1894 - The Little Lost Child, by song-book publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern became a massive hit in the music halls. This was due to the idea of 'marrying' music to images, the invention of American electrician/photographer George Thomas. Thomas's idea consisted of creating a series of still images printed onto glass slides and then coloured in by hand and projected onto screen alongside a live musical performance.
1930 - 1931 - Spooney Melodies was a series of five musical shorts, produced by Warner Brothers. They were films that mixed art-deco animation and live-action footage which aimed to showcase the popular tunes of the day. Crying' for the Carolines is known to have outlived the other films. In addition, in this era, musical films were taking off dramatically.
1950s - A jukebox that incorporated a 16mm film component called the Scopitone was invented by a company called Cameca in Courbevoie. The Cinebox and Scoptione emigrated to the USA in the 1960s. By 1967, the craze for video jukeboxes had died down, but the enthusiasm for music videos hit new heights.
1970s - It was television that truly embraced music videos with programmes such as Top of the Pops and Australian TV shows including Countdown, popularising the genre. Russell Mulcahy was hired to shoot videos for songs that didn't already have their own promo clips. He created the 'Video Killed the Radio Star' for The Buggles, which became the first music video ever to be played on MTV in 1981!
1980s - Round-the-clock music video channels have become the norm since the 1980s. In addition, MTV launched their Music Awards (now known as the VMAs). Due to the popularisation of music videos, directors started to become more ambitious; evident with Michael Jackson's Thriller, which cost $500,000 to make and created more opportunities for African-American artists in the music scene.
As MTV's focus has now shifted more to reality TV shows than music videos, the internet has become the most popular way for audience's to watch music videos, specifically Youtube. Due to advancements in digital technology and cross media convergence, people can check out music videos anywhere, and anytime due to devices such as their smart phones.
