History of Music Videos

Music Videos had a massive surge in popularity in the early 80's as channels like MTV launched. This meant music videos became easily accessible to more people, adding a new platform for musicians to display their music whilst also allowing them to add a new visual element to their music that can give a deeper meaning or help to emphasise the message of the song.

      


Arguably earlier videos were more simplistic. For example, Madonna's 'Material Girl' and 'Video Killed the Radio Star' by The Buggles only feature the artists playing and singing the song with their bands, the location doesn't change that often if at all and the shots do not change as much. As music video's have progressed and technology improved they have become more complicated showing more of a plot line and a story that complimented the song rather than videos of  the bands just playing out their songs. For example Alt J's music video for their song 'Breezeblocks' doesn't feature the musicians at all but is very plot driven, capturing the audience through its plot twists, clever shots and rewinding and fast forwarding to enable them to show a seemingly deep story in a short amount of time.




Pop music videos specifically have changed over time, simply by its nature as obviously pop is what is popular of the time and this can change a lot. Although the main structure of a pop song seems to have remained fairly similar over time, consisting of verse and repeated chorus commonly being around 2 minutes but could range from 2-5 minutes. Pop music videos tend to either be the a typical boy-girl love story that shows romance and heartbreak or try and break boundaries. For example, Britney Spears went from being quite an innocent young star, working with disney and making music through them and then pushed away from that and created very different products such as, 'Hit me baby one more time'