History of the music video

The history of the music video dates back to the 19th century, where in 1894 two musicians hired an electrctian and actors to promote sales of their new song.  They projected a series of relevant images on screen, accompanied with live performances from the musicians. This is widely regarded as the first form of the music video, and the basic conventions and forms of this are still in use today. Although this wasn't a music video in the form we see it today as it wasn't a single moving image format this was the first step to combine commercial music with moving images of dancers and actors.

In 1926 Vitaphone produced a series of musical short films which were produced by Warner Bros. These videos were six minutes in duration and featured a song accompanied by a series of animations and shots of the artist singing the background song. Many people consider these shorts to be the first music videos as they combined music and visuals in one video format.

Later in the 1960's the hit band "The Animals" filmed a music video to accompany their song House of the Rising Sun. The video featured a performance of the band miming to the song on a location set specifically built for the video. The video featured a series of tracking shots, close-ups and establishing shots and most importantly had a unfolding plotline. After this, many videos followed suite with popular bands such as the Beatles creating music videos to accompany their songs. Also the introduction of specialist music video channels in the late 90's such as MTV allowed the broadcasting of music videos. After the introduction of MTV, the music video became very popular. 

In 2006 with the rising popularity of video sharing websites such as YouTube, it allowed bands to reach millions and become internet viral hits. Music videos such as "Here it goes again" by Ok Go became huge viral hits gaining millions of views on YouTube. It allows artists with a small budget to broadcast their media online for free, where as before it may have been an expensive and lengthy process to have a music video broadcasted on television channels. YouTube also allowed amateur filmakers such as ourselves to reach millions for free and created a whole new division of amateur music videos.