Music History Timeline

In 1894 the first 'illustrated song' was produced, this involved several still images which were projected on to a screen whilst a live performance of Little Lost Child was played. This allowed the audience for the first time ever to have a visual whilst listening to a song at the same time.

By 1926 the arrival of the 'Talkies' brought the idea of visuals with music further through musical short films. These featured bands, vocalists and dancers which gave a live experience of what was to become a music video.

Longer musical films were established during the period of 1930 - 1959 and this was a genre in which songs were incorporated in to the film itself.

1940 - 1949 saw the arrival of many promotional clips which showed many famous jazz artists and their bands on in a mini movie type of clip.

In 1964 the Beatles release their 'A Hard Days Night' which was a motion picture featuring themselves, this was definitely a step forward towards the modern music video.

Shortly after in 1965, the Beatles recorded 10 films which were then used to promote the release of albums. This is what really kick started the idea of video promotion into practise.

Music marketing by the mid 80's was starting to be taken over by music videos as the launch of MTV, which was a 24 hour music programme allowed music videos to be shown around the clock.

Michael Jackson's music video 'Thriller' was released on December 2nd 1983, the music video was 13 minutes and 43 seconds long, it was voted as the most influential pop music video of all time and it was listed as the most successful video ever in 2006 by Guiness World Records.

Following 'Thriller', on May 31st 1995 Michael Jackson released his song 'Scream' which featured his sister. This video won many MTV music awards along with a grammy. It cost in total around 7 million dollars landing itself a spot in the Guiness World Records for the most expensive video ever made.

The launch of Youtube in 2005 was a massive step forward for the music industry and in terms of music videos and reaching a wider audience for an artist to promote their music, this was definitely set to be a huge success. Youtube is a video sharing website which allows not only signed artists to post music videos online but it allows absolutely anybody the ability to upload their videos for people all over the world to view. In May 2011 Youtube said in a blog that they were receiving more than 3 billion video streams per day, however in January 2012 this figure had risen to over 4 billion views per day, showing us that Youtube is still a consistently growing social media site 7 years since it was first available.

In 2005 we also saw the launch of iTunes, which is a media player that allows you to play, save and organise music, but more importantly allows you to download music videos directly from the internet. iTunes was proved to be a huge success and crucial step forward within music videos after reaching a mark of over one million downloads after just twenty days.

In 2010, 183 million viewers boosted the number of music videos viewed online to roughly 34 billion, this just shows how relevant and necessary music videos are to both the artists target audiences and other audiences as they are easily accessible and there is a clear demand for them.