History of Medium

The history of Music videos has only been recent, as the first ever music video for a song and not just for a movie is classed as Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' in 1975, however there has been arguments towards this as others state that Bob Dylan’s 'Don't look back', which was filmed in 1965 but yet released in 1967. The video included Bob Dylan standing in front of the camera to the right of the screen in a long shot, in the background we see the back of a hotel in black and white. He is holding some placard cards with the lyrics of his song and he is showing them in time with the lyrics, which are being sung over the top, it is a very simple music video. Queen's music video for 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was very innovative for the time of its release as no one had seen anything like it in the past, the video only cost £4,500 to make and took only 4 hours, Queen released the audio version before the released the video and was already a hit but not as big as they wanted it to be, so they decided to release the song along with a video, this was a huge success for the group and they managed to sell over 1 million copies by the end of January.




One of the most popular and famous music videos of all time is Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' 1983, which lasted 13 minutes 42 seconds, making it the longest music video in history. It's the most successful music video as it has sold over 9 million copies as of 2006 since its release. The video cost $500,000 to produce. When the video was released it was put on television nationally and replaced every show on television for 13 minutes, this was a brilliant way to advertise his brand new single and its new music video.



In August of 1981 a new television channel was added to American TV sets called MTV 'Music Television', this channel was specifically made to promote and show music videos. The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by television personalities known as "video jockeys," or VJs. In its early years, MTV's main target demographic were young adults, but today, MTV's programming is primarily targeted at adolescents and teenagers. MTV has spawned numerous sister channels in the U.S. and affiliated channels internationally, some of which have gone independent. MTV's influence on its audience, including issues related to censorship and social activism, has been a subject of debate for years. As of August 2013, approximately 97,654,000 American households (85.51% of households with television) receive MTV.

Before the introduction of a single music video on it's own, many music videos were shot for films, this mainly happened during the 50s/60s. For example Elvis Presley's ‘Jailhouse Rock’ video was a scene shot for his musical drama film 'Jailhouse Rock' (1957),  The single was released in April of 1957 and was a number one hit in the U.S for 7 weeks, then in October of 1957 the original movie was released and included the music video for Jailhouse Rock. Other Artists who have managed to do the same as Presley was the Beatles 'A Hard Day's Night' (1964), The single was released just a few days after the film, however the song is featured in the film right at the beginning and has a video to accompany it, of the four Beatles trying to escape from the horde of young girls who are chasing them. This was a recurring thing with the Beatles and Elvis, they would release a movie with at least six songs within each, and then later or earlier than the release of the film they would release them as singles and later make albums from the movies.