History of Music Videos

The first ever music video was produced by Warner Brothers in 1930, music videos were called "musical short films", and each lasted approximately 6 minutes. These music videos were in Black and White due to the lack of technology.
Musical short films consisted of a variety of backgrounds and animations and the artist singing in the front.
The first ever music video series was called "Spooney Melodies". Spooney Melodies featured a range of artists vocalists and dancers.

In the 1940s promotional clips were introduced for the "Visual Jukebox" (The Panoram). These promotional clips were usually, approximately, 3 minutes long and were used/played in bars and cafes in big cities such as New York. After WW2 these Panoram videos became extinct due to the introduction of the Television.

The 1960s saw The Beatles release their first feature film to promote "A Hard Days Night" which was one of their upcoming chart hits at the time. A Hard Days Night was a mock documentary film, which had music videos throughout.
A US TV series "The Monkees" which featured the pop group The Monkees also included segments of Music Video to accompany various Monkees songs.

In the 1970s promotional clips became more and more popular, concert footage was being shown on TV to promote national artists and bands to get them recognised internationally.
In 1974, two Australian TV shows had aired, Countdown and Sounds, both of these TV shows, showed music videos all over Australia and even had artists perform on the show to gain popularity for the themselves and the shows.
In the late 1970s, British TV show, Top Of The Pops, began to show music videos.

1981 was a really extravagant year for music video due to MTV, MTV is an American video channel which began the Era of 24 hours-a-day of music videos.
The year of 1983 saw the most successful and influential music video of all time, which was Micheal Jackson's "Thriller" which was nearly 14 minutes long.

Since the year 2005, the Internet has become "Music video friendly" and anybody that has access to the Internet, also has access to any music video of their choice.