History of Music Videos

• The first musical short films were made in 1923-24, then many followed in six years later, featuring bands, vocalists and dancers.

• Early 1930s cartoons featured popular musicians performing their hit songs on-camera in live action segments during the cartoons.

• Another early form of music video were one-song films called "Promotional Clips" made in the 1940s for the Panoram visual jukebox. These were short films of musical selections, usually just a band on a movie-set bandstand, made for playing.

• According to the Internet Accuracy Project, disk jockey-singer J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson was the first to coin the phrase "music video", in 1959.

• MTV (Music Television) was a phenomenon that gave so much power and importance to the music video. MTV started broadcasting in 1981 in the USA and it marked the beginning of the music video’s ruling over the music industry. The first video ever played on MTV was ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ by The Buggles.