A Brief History and Features of music videos

In modern culture a music video is a film or video accompanying a piece of music. It is often used as a way of promoting a certain artist or song. The concept originates from using live recordings of songs to promote an artist as well as being influenced by 1930’s musical films and the “Soundies” which where predominantly used to promote jazz music in the 1940’s.

Music video’s did begin to gain favour during the 1960’s and 70’s for instance artists such as the Beatles and Bob Dylan began using promotional clips. However it was the introduction of MTV (music television) in the 1980’s which truly brought the media form to a mass audience. The first music video to be aired on MTV was The Buggle’s “Video Killed The Radio Star” this represented the change occurring at that time particularly well.



It is fairly difficult to identify any specific conventions of the music video genre since there are so many variations, however since a music video is primarily designed to promote the artist it usually features:

• Many close-ups and long shots which draw attention to the artist and the location
• Tracking and Panning used to draw attention to the artist or subject
• Mise-en-scene which reflects the theme of the track
• Frequent use of jump-cuts to change between different scenes as well as a variety of different transitions, eg. Fades
• The sound is usually just the track however some music videos will have sounds from the narrative
• Props and Costumes which reflect the genre of music eg. Rappers having “Bling” and rock bands playing their instruments.

These are by no means definite guidelines since many artists experiment with conceptually different videos. We can also identify a music video by looking at the 6 key features identified by Andrew Goodwin in his book “Dancing In The Distraction Factory” (1992)

• Genre characteristics
• Relationship between music and visuals
• Relationship between lyrics and visuals
• Frequent close-ups of the artist to fulfil the demands of the record label, many artists have a visual motive which persists throughout many of their music videos
• Voyeurism, particularly towards the female body in modern music videos
• Intertextual references