Bohemian Rhapsody, released in 1975 and was a number one hit for 9 weeks1, music video is widely considered to be the first one, there are many reasons for this. Bohemian Rhapsody was the first video to be shot on the medium of video before this point the majority of them where on film2. Before Bohemian Rhapsody the films where just of the band singing on a stage and where taken from television shows the song was performed on, or the music video would be taken from a movie with the same name staring the singer for example see jailhouse rock3. Bohemian Rhapsody was innovate as it was the first music video to have images take preferences over the song and was based on there album cover 4 It was shot in 3 hours for $3,500. Effects were achieved by using camera feedback and prism lenses5.From this it is easy to see that Bohemian Rhapsody also set down many of the conventions that modern music video, with a mixture of images to do with the song, or more commonly an abstract series of images that loosely fit the lyrics, and images band singing. The reason queen made the video was so that the song could be shown on Top of the Pops, a show on the BBC, they made the video because the song was too hard for them to perform live with the technology available for the performance.
After queen used Bohemian Rhapsody many British bands took to using a premade video on top of the pops6. Top of the pops first appeared on our screens on new year’s day 19647, it offered a television version of what many radio stations already had, a weekly countdown of the chart music, the thing it had in advantage over the radio stations was that people could go to recordings and those recordings would have live bands playing at them. The show spawned a number of spin offs including Top of the pops 2 and a Saturday morning version. The show was finally cancelled in 2006 on the 30th of july8, TOTP2 has run a few specials showing clips from the archive of the show the Saturday morning one had finished a few years earlier when the show that hosted it had been stopped, however there are still yearly Christmas shows9.
However music videos started out as being something that artist just made to get the music shown on MTV and the likes. Many videos would conform to the conventions that Queen had set down and would eventually be able to be grouped as, Narrative, has a story line run through it, performance, mainly focused on the band playing at a large venue or the artists dancing, or artsy, where no one could tell what was going on. This dislike for videos changed with the Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Thriller is a land mark in music video history, it starts with a long bit of film that we learn is meant to be a movie, Thriller used a professional director and make man who work on horror movies. Thriller is a combination between two of the styles, Performance and Narrative. Thriller is held up by most as the first music video that was made to enhance the song. Thriller also was the first time people realised they could make money from selling the music videos.
MTV is a channel that first appeared in the 1980’s. It was a television channel devoted to music. MTV started out by just showing music videos, there was one great advantage to this was that people wanted to see the videos and companies weren’t charging for them. When record companies started charging for music videos MTV started creating other shows to go round the music videos these where normally based around bands/performers and celebrates, this evolution and growth of MTV caused many other channels to form that just showed certain types of music videos things like Kerrang TV.
Now nearly every song has to have a video if it wants to see the light of day on any of the charts. Many bands and production companies having their own YouTube channels to show their music videos. So from its growth from not being very important to it know being one of the most important things to a band a music video hasn’t changed much and they still follow the conventions of their grandfather Bohemian Rhapsody.
1. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=685
2. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=685
3. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=574
4. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=685
5. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=685
6. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=685
7. http://www.bbc.co.uk/totp/history/index.shtml
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_of_the_Pops
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_of_the_Pops
