History of my chosen medium

A music video is a short film or video that accompanies a piece of music/song. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. Although the origins of music videos go back much further, they came into their own in the 1980s, when MTV based their format around the medium, and later with the launch of VH1. The term "music video" first came into popular usage in the early 1980s. Prior to that time, these works were described by various terms including "filmed insert", "promotional (promo) film", "promotional (promo) clip" or "film clip". With the arrival of the sound films and talkies in 1926, many Musical short films were produced. Vitaphone shorts (1926–30), which were produced by Warner Bros, featured many bands, vocalists and dancers. The series entitled Spooney Melodies was the first true musical video series. The shorts lasted about six minutes long and featured art deco style animations and backgrounds combined with film of the performer singing the song. This series of shorts can arguably be considered to be the earliest music videos. 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". Early 1930s cartoons featured popular musicians performing their hit songs on-camera in live-action segments during the cartoons. Another early form of music video were one-song films called "Promotional Clips" made in the 1940s for the Panoram visual jukebox. These were short films of musical selections, usually just a band on a movie-set bandstand, made for playing. Thousands of soundies were made, mostly of jazz musicians, but also of "torch singers," comedians, and dancers.

Many "song films"—often referred to as "filmed inserts" at that time—were produced by UK artists so they could be screened on TV when the bands were not available to appear live. Many countries with local pop music industries soon copied the trend towards promo film clips. In Australia, promotional films by Australian pop performers were being made on a regular basis by 1966; in 1968 singer Lynne Randell featured in one of the first promotional clips for an Australian act that was filmed in colour, but most Australian clips from this period were in black and white, due to the fact that Australia did not convert to colour TV until early 1975.