Tag Archives: Music Videos

Music videos have been a widely used component of the record industry since the 1980s and the creation of MTV, which afforded for the first time a ready-to-use delivery system for the films that bands and artists might create to promote their work. Since then a well-executed or memorably conceived music video has been shown to have the ability to propel the conversation around a song or an artist and to make a permanent impact on the pop cultural landscape. Though music videos are most associated with the record industry of the last several decades, they have precursors in earlier eras of popular music, as some form of the music video has been around for a long time, albeit often in more marginal and technically clunky forms than are widely available today. Pop culture historians date the first instance of something resembling the modern music video at least in its basic conception and approach to a date as far back as 1894, at a time when the main means for dissemination of popular music was not through recording technology but rather through the sale of sheet music enabling people to sing the songs themselves. For the promotion of the song … Continue reading