Music Video History

• Music videos generally started with experimenting by Oscar Fischinger in the 1920s and have since been a growing media experimentation and large part of the music entertainment industry.
  
• One convention that seemed to crop up a lot the early 'short films' is sexually explicit content, such as a high level of female display which is something we still commonly find within music videos in modern day. Overt sexuality has always been recognized and accepted within music videos.
  
•  Another feature that began to make its way into music videos around the 60s is to pastiche moments from Hollywood in their music videos and this has also become increasingly common.
  
• The Monkees introduced a new style to music videos to the insularity which included surrealism, jump cuts, wacky comedy and lots of action mixed in with the music performance by the band; these are now concepts that are extremely widely and commonly used within music videos today, so a lot of past experimental methods used in the past have worked to influence our present and future music videos.
  
• Around the 60s it would cost on average $8000 to produce a music video and by the time we reached the late 90s budgets for music videos were ranging in the millions. The higher budget videos also in turn generated record sales and as these extravagantly priced videos were generally of the Hip-Hop genre it led to Hip-Hop effectively replacing Rock as the dominant music genre.