1940s Peak period of MGM Hollywood musical
1954 Elvis Presley records That's All Right (Mama)
1960 Scopitone introduced in France
1963 UK's first music TV programme Ready Steady Go (ITV)
1964 Top of the Pops TV programme begins (BBC)
The Beatles release the film and album A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester)
1966 The Monkees' TV show starts on NBC in the USA
1967 The Beatles release TV promos for Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields Forever , which used techniques such as reversed film effects, dramatic lighting, unusual camera angles and rhythmic editing.
1968 The animated film Yellow Submarine was an international sensation, although The Beatles themselves were only a little involved in it. Soon it was commonplace for artists to make promotional films, and bands like The Byrds and The Beach Boys were also making promotional films and were aired on pop music TV shows.
1975 Queen: Bohemian Rhapsody (Bruce Gowers)
1977 Saturday Night Fever (John Badham)
1979 Buggles: Video Killed the Radior Star (Russell Mulcahy)
1980 David Bowie: Ashes to Ashes (David Mallet and David Bowie)
1981 Pop Clips on Nickelodeon
MTV starts
Duran Duran: Girls on Film (Kevin Godley and Lol Creme)
1983 Michael Jackson: Thriller (John Landis)
Beginning of Country Music Television (CMT)
1984 Music Box starts in Europe
MTV Video Music Awards launched
1985 VH1 begins
MTV taken over by Viacom
Live Aid
1986 Dire Straits: Money for Nothing (Steve Barron) is top video
1987 MTV-Europe (MTV-E) lanched, broadcasting to 1.6 million homes
Peter Gabriel: Sledgehammer (Stephen Johnson), wins best director
1988 MTV-Europe achieves 3.5 million subscribers
1989 MTV-Europe reaches 6.7 million homes
Live broadcast from Moscow Peace Festival
Madonna: Express Yourself (David Fincher
Launch of MTV-Unplugged
1991 Madonna: Justify My Love (Jean Baptiste Mondino)
1992 MTV launches The Real World, a fly-on-the-wall documentary following the lives of seven people sharing a New York loft
1993 MTV launches TV series Beavis and Butthead
1994 REM: Everybody Hurts (Jake Scott), wins best director award
Launch of VH1 in UK
Launch of MTV-Europe Music Awards
1997 MTV UK and Ireland launches as stand-alone channel
1998 Launch of Celebrity Deathmatch
1999 Fatboy Slim: Praise You (Spike Jonze), wins best director award
2000 Launch of Jackass
2001 Launch of MTV Dance
Modern era
The key innovation in the development of the modern music video was of course video recording and editing processes, along with the development of a number of related effects such as chroma-key. The advent of high-quality colour videotape recorders and portable video cameras enabled many pop acts to produce promotional videos quickly and cheaply, in comparison to the relatively high costs of using film.
Mid 1980s - releasing a music video to accompany your new single had become standard, and acts like The Jacksons sought to gain a commercial edge by creating lavish music videos with million dollar budgets; most notable with the video for "Can You Feel It".
In the UK the importance of Top of the Pops to promote a single created an environment of innovation and competition amongst bands and record labels as the show's producers placed strict limits on the number of videos it would use - therefore a good video would increase a song's sales as viewers hoped to see the video again the following week.
Top of the Pops was censorus in its approach to video content so another approach was for an act to produce a promo that would be banned or edited. Early examples of this tactic were Duran Duran's "Girls on Film" and Frankie Goes to Hollywood with "Relax".Countdown, which was based on Top Of The Pops, hit off in Australia but other countries quickly followed the format. At its highpoint during most of the 1980s it was to be aired in 22 countries including TV Europe. Countdown is still aired in the UK up till today as CD:UK by ITV.
Although Countdown continued to rely heavily on 'live' appearances by local and visiting acts, competing shows like Sounds lacked the resources to present regular studio performances, so they were soon using music videos almost exclusively. Countdown was able to use music videos to break a number of important new local and overseas acts like ABBA, Queen, Meat Loaf, Blondie, Devo, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna.
Michael Jackson
In the early to mid 1980s, artists started to use more sophisticated effects in their videos, and added a storyline or plot to the music video. Michael Jackson was the first artist to create the concept of the short film. A short film is a music video that has a beginning, middle and end. He did this in a small way with Billie Jean, then in a Westside story way with Beat It, but it wasn't until the 1984 release of the Thriller short film, that he took music videos to another level. Thriller was a 13 minute long music video that had a beginning, a middle and an ending. The video was directed by John Landis. Jackson then went on to make more famous short films such as, Bad (directed by Martin Scorsese), Smooth Criminal, Remember the Time, Jam, Black or White, Earth Song, and Ghosts.
Internet
As broadband Internet access has become available more widely, various initiatives have been made to capitalise on the continued interest in music videos. MTV itself now provides streams of artists' music videos, while AOL's recently launched AOL Music features a vast collection of downloadable videos. At its launch, Apple's iTunes Music Store provided a section of free music videos in high quality compression to be watched via the iTunes application.
More recently the iTunes music store has begun selling music videos for use on Apple's recently introduced iPod with video playback capability. Another new phenomenon, deriving from the popularity of blogging, is the use of so-called music video "codes", lines of HTML code including links to music videos that the individual can simply copy and paste into their blog in order to feature a given video streaming on it.
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