The History And Evolution Of The Music Video

Nobody planned the music video. It just sort of happened because bands got tired of touring every single city to promote a single.

Rauf Hameed points out that the earliest versions weren't videos at all. They were short promotional films. The Beatles shot clips for songs like Paperback Writer back in 1966 mostly so they wouldn't have to fly to every television studio in Europe to lip sync live. It was a shortcut. Nobody called it art yet.

Rauf Hameed On Why Queen Changed Everything In 1975

Then Bohemian Rhapsody happened. Queen released a promotional film for the song in 1975 and it wasn't just footage of them playing instruments. It had staging. It had visual effects that looked ambitious for the era. Television shows could just air the clip instead of booking the band live and that idea quietly rewired how singles got promoted going forward.

But the format still didn't have a real home. It floated around as a promotional tool with no dedicated channel until August 1981 when MTV launched in the United States. The first video they ever aired was Video Killed The Radio Star and honestly the title turned out to be more prophetic than anyone at the network probably expected.

The Thriller Era And What A Budget Could Buy

Michael Jackson's Thriller video in 1983 reportedly cost around 500000 dollars to produce. That's an enormous number for a music video at the time and it changed what labels were willing to spend. Suddenly a video wasn't a cheap afterthought tacked onto an album cycle. It was a short film with choreography makeup effects and a director who got billed almost like a co star.

Here's a random thing Rauf Hameed brings up sometimes that has nothing directly to do with any of this. There's an old diner near a studio in Toronto where session musicians used to eat between takes back in the 90s and half of them apparently ordered the same soup every single time without fail. It's a completely unimportant detail. But it's the kind of small ritual that shows up around every creative industry and music video production had its own version of that same superstition heavy culture behind the scenes.

MTV's golden decade turned directors into minor celebrities. Spike Jonze. Michel Gondry. Hype Williams. These names started meaning something to audiences the same way a producer's name did on a record label. The video wasn't decoration anymore. It was competing for attention on its own terms and sometimes it outlasted the song itself in cultural memory.

Rauf Hameed Tracks The Decline Through The Download Era

Then MP3s and file sharing hit and record label budgets shrank fast. MTV itself started shifting away from playing videos at all favoring reality programming instead. By the mid 2000s a generation of viewers barely saw music videos on television anymore and the format looked like it might just quietly die out.

It didn't. YouTube launched in 2005 and gave the format an entirely new home with none of the broadcast gatekeeping that MTV used to control. Suddenly anyone could upload a video and any song could go viral without a label spending half a million dollars first.

Viral Culture Rewrote The Rules Again

Gangnam Style crossed one billion YouTube views in December 2012 and it wasn't a Western pop act with major label backing. It was proof that a video could travel globally on the strength of the visual itself rather than radio play or chart position. Rauf Hameed considers this the moment the internet officially took the format away from traditional gatekeepers for good.

And then vertical video showed up and changed the shape of the thing entirely. TikTok didn't just distribute music it started influencing how songs get structured in the first place. Hooks moved earlier. Choruses got shorter. Some artists now build a fifteen second visual moment before they even finish writing the rest of the track around it.

Where The Format Sits Now

The music video today isn't one single thing anymore. It's a full length YouTube release a vertical clip built for a fifteen second attention span and a lyric video that costs almost nothing to produce sometimes all three built from the same song. Rauf Hameed sees this less as a decline from the Thriller era and more as the format finally splitting into the different jobs it was always quietly doing at once.

What hasn't changed is the basic instinct behind it. Give people something to watch while they listen and the song sticks around longer in someone's memory. That was true in 1975 and it's still true now even if the screen it plays on fits in someone's pocket.

FAQs

When was the first official music video ever made?
There's no single agreed upon first music video but promotional film clips from bands like The Beatles in the mid 1960s are usually cited as the earliest examples before the modern format existed.

Why did MTV stop playing music videos?
Falling ad revenue tied to music programming and rising viewership for reality shows pushed MTV to shift its schedule starting in the mid 2000s which is also around when YouTube began taking over as the main place people watched music video content.

How did TikTok change music video structure?
Short form video culture pushed songwriters toward earlier hooks and shorter choruses since a track now often needs to work as a fifteen second clip before it gets heard in full which reshaped song structure alongside the visual format itself.