Artist made music videos long before MTV came on the scene.
Who were they made for?
HBO played them in the 70’s. But if they were supposed to be promotional that seems like an very narrow venue to use. Most people did not have cable in the 70’s much less Home Box Office.
It was rare that they were played anywhere else. Most of them weren’t ever seen until the 80’s and 90’s when more people had cable and satellite service. By that time those old videos were irrelevant. The songs were old and many of the bands had split up.
So originally who and what were those videos made for?
Whatever its other claims to fame might be, MTV was not by any measure the first popular music showcase. I can think of five pop music shows in Australia alone that predated MTV, and had a mix of music videos, concert footage, bands in the studio and interviews. These were on normal TV and some of them were in very mainstream / family watching timeslots, and were major influences on the charts and broke bands.
Music videos were always there to promote an artist and to sell records.
If you pick AC/DC as a band that most people know, most of the footage of them pre-MTV on Youtube is either taped appearances on music shows or clips flogging their new releases that were played when other bands were in the studio.
Oh yeah - there were definitely pre-MTV video shows, including specific videos created for the songs (i.e. not just concert clips). I remember them on HBO but they did get shown elsewhere as well.
There’s a reason “Video Killed The Radio Star” was already a thing and in place to be the first video MTV played.
I remember some artists (particularly David Bowie, Blondie and Peter Gabriel) were experimenting with the format just to see what they could create and where it would go. It was more art for art’s sake than anything else to them. Or at least that’s what they said in interviews at the time. Unfortunately, most of these weren’t available in my area, so I heard about them but never got to see them until they were re-broadcast in the 80s.
A lot of other artists did it purely for promotional work. Queen’s video for Bohemian Rhapsody was done mostly for promotion. They were sure it was going to be a hit and knew that if they had a video, it would get played on Top of the Pops once the song took off, which would give it a wider audience and would make it even more popular. Top of the Pops was a UK show made by the BBC. Like a lot of BBC shows, episodes were often shown on PBS late at night in the U.S. (at least where I lived). Our TV had the big 3 networks, one independent station, and two PBS stations, so you didn’t need cable to see music videos. Only one of the PBS stations played BBC content at night.
USA Network got its start in the late 70s (several years before MTV) and while they were originally focused mostly on sports, they would play music videos and other non-sports programming late at night. I remember watching Night Flight on USA, which was included in our standard cable package and wasn’t an extra cost like HBO. Night Flight had documentaries, interviews, old movies, and lots of other things besides music videos. Night Flight got its start before MTV, but not by much, IIRC.
I also remember watching Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and Midnight Special in the 1970s. These were mostly live concerts by various artists, and usually weren’t modern-style videos. Again, the concerts were mostly for promotion, and even big-name artists were paid minimal amounts to appear on the shows.
The Wikipedia page for Music Video has a history of the genre.
In 1894, sheet music publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern hired electrician George Thomas and various artists to promote sales of their song “The Little Lost Child”.[2] Using a magic lantern, Thomas projected a series of still images on a screen simultaneous to live performances. This would become a popular form of entertainment known as the illustrated song, the first step toward music video.[2]
With the arrival of “talkies” many musical short films were produced. Vitaphone shorts (produced by Warner Bros.) featured many bands, vocalists, and dancers. Animation artist Max Fleischer introduced a series of sing-along short cartoons called Screen Songs, which invited audiences to sing along to popular songs by “following the bouncing ball”, which is similar to a modern karaoke machine. Early cartoons featured popular musicians performing their hit songs on camera in live-action segments during the cartoons. John Logie Baird created Phonovision discs featuring Betty Bolton and other singers from the 1930s. The early animated films by Walt Disney, such as the Silly Symphonies shorts and especially Fantasia, which featured several interpretations of classical pieces, were built around music. The Warner Bros. cartoons, even today billed as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, were initially fashioned around specific songs from upcoming Warner Bros. musical films. Live-action musical shorts, featuring such popular artists as Cab Calloway, were also distributed to theaters.
In the late 1950s[11] the Scopitone, a visual jukebox, was introduced in France and short films were produced by many French artists, such as Serge Gainsbourg, Françoise Hardy, Jacques Dutronc, and the Belgian Jacques Brel to accompany their songs. Its use spread to other countries, and similar machines such as the Cinebox in Italy and Color-sonic in the U.S. were patented.[11] In 1961, for the Canadian-produced show Singalong Jubilee, Manny Pittson began pre-recording the music audio, went on-location and taped various visuals with the musicians lip-synching, then edited the audio and video together. Most music numbers were taped in-studio on stage, and the location shoot “videos” were to add variety.
On January 1 1964, Johnnie Stewart and Stanley Dorfman created the British chart music television series Top of the Pops, which they produced in tandem and directed in weekly rotation until the 1970s*.[13]* The show’s format created a demand for frequent studio appearances by renowned British and American artists at short notice, as the charts came out on Tuesday mornings and the show was taped live on Thursdays. Coupled with the artists busy touring schedules and subsequent requests from broadcasters in Europe and America to showcase popular British acts, ultimately prompted the production of pre-recorded or filmed inserts referred to as “promotional videos.” These videos served as substitutes for live performances by the artists and played a pivotal role in the development of the music video genre.[14][15][16] During the early stages of the show’s debut in 1964, when alternative footage was unavailable, Dorfman and Stewart resorted to capturing footage of the enthusiastic audience dancing. However, a significant change took place in October 1964 when a decision was made to occasionally introduce a dance troupe with choreographed routines for specific tracks.
Indeed there were music videos broadcast on TV prior to MTV. I remember the Beatles’ Let It Be and Hey Jude videos (aired first live on the David Frost Show in England in 1968, then a month later on The Smothers Brother’s Show in America), but MTV brought them to a new level.
I recall watching MTV’s debut in ‘81. The format was pretty much entirely music videos, hosted by entertaining VJs. As a young, straight man, I had a crush on cute Martha Quinn, though others preferred Nina Blackwood. Between them and Showtime’s scantily-clad Aerobisize gals, it was a good time to be young and have a TV.
I believe MTV elevated music videos to an art form. The production values of many were quite high. MTV has since drifted into much more original reality programming (Snooky, anyone?), but I really haven’t watched much in recent decades.
Back when MTV first started a lot of people asked that question and the answer I heard most often was they were intended to be “promotional” for the song and the artist which I always took to meant to show to people in the industry or if they had a specific need for the song to be played in the visual medium. But also as others have said there were venues for the public to see music videos; they were just much smaller and less watched than MTV became.
But of course the truth is there weren’t that many made before MTV. In fact, MTV had a hard time in the beginning because they just didn’t have that many to show so there was a lot of repetition.
1964 was the pivotal year for music “video” when the Beatles made a highly profitable low budget movie by stringing together what was essentially a bunch of music videos with some linking material. This was just a slight tweak on traditional Rock n Roll films that linked stage performances together with a paper thin story narrative. But now it was shown that you didn’t even need to show the artist performing; they could just be running around a sports field. Budget conscious TV took notice immediately.
That was never their claim. Their claim to fame was being the first cable network totally devoted to music. Which, to the best of my knowledge, is true. Like Australia, what we think of as music videos were shown on regular television on shows. For example “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” by Leonard Nimoy was filmed for a variety show called Malibu U.
And now that I think about it, were musical shorts popular back in the heyday of movie theaters in the 20s, 30s and 40s? Like you might go see a movie, and before it starts you watch news reels, some cartoons, and maybe some musical shorts?
As posted above - it’s even in the names: “Looney Tunes, Silly Symphonies, Merrie Melodies”. And using public domain music meant a lot of free to use material.
Though “Merrie Melodies” in particular often had something from the Warner Bros music catalog and sometimes played by a band known at the time. And those were used to promote upcoming WB movies/bands.
For various reasons it took a while before something similar could be reliably, regularly, and affordably be created for live acts. It’s almost certainly no accident it didn’t really happen much until TV was much more widespread.
ETA: Noticed the appropriate username/post combo. Nice!
Here is a musical short film of Cab Calloway from 1934. Not only does is have a film of the band performing, it also has a “concept video” with a storyline. (And also a commercial endorsement. Oh, well, art is not always pristine.)
According to Wikipedia:
•MTV “officially launched on August 1, 1981.”
•“The YouTube channel was registered on Feb 1, 2005.” In 2010, it had “only” 100,000 subscribers. By 2012 that had reached 1 million. Today it is over 36 million.
•YouTube “was launched on February 14, 2005.” I cannot explain that 2 week discrepancy.
Before the HTTP protocol was released in 1997, only a relative handful of people accessed the internet recreationally.
I’ve seen a whole bunch of reaction YouTube vids to Ram Jam’s “Black Betty.” It’s just them playing the song at what looks like a back yard party. Where did that get aired?
The Monkees obviously did a music video or two every week. By the second season they had gotten past music playing while they romped. “Goin’ Down” could be excerpted and played on MTV without anyone thinking it odd.
The first season of Laugh-In, early 1968, had a number of specially commissioned music videos which fit the modern format exactly. I think these are the first American music videos that weren’t intended for the artists’ own show.
No question that the Brits were way ahead in the regular production of music videos, though. Many more outlets than were found in America from the 60s onward.
