History of MTV and Music Videos

A music video is a short film integrating a song and imagery, produced for promotional or artistic purposes. 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 date back much further, they became prominent in the 1980s, when MTV based their channel around music videos.

The long-running British TV show Top of The Pops began playing music videos in the late 1970s, therefore a good video would increase a song's sales as viewers hoped to see it again the following week.

In 1981, the US video channel MTV launched, airing 'Video Killed the Radio Star' and beginning an era of 24-hour-a-day music on television. Many important acts of this period, most notably Duran Duran and Madonna, owed a great deal of their success to the skillful construction and seductive appeal of their videos.

In 1984, MTV also launched the MTV Music Video Awards, an annual awards event that would come to mark MTV's importance in the music industry. In 1985, MTV launched the channel VH1 (Video Hits One), featuring softer music, and meant to cater to an older demographic than MTV.

From the 1990's MTV began to introduce many different genres of music to the channel. In 1991 alternative rock music was introduced to the channel with bands such as Nirvana and Green Day becoming more popular. In 1997 electronica acts were pushed by the channel with acts such as The Prodigy and Daft Punk. In late 1997 however, MTV began to move towards the pop and R&B genres as boy bands and pop 'princesses' became increasingly popular. Since then MTV has branched out with its range of channels aimed at a more niche audience, as you can see on the image to the left there are now a significant number of individual channels.

Viva, a music channel which is one of two available through Freeview TV, is owned by MTV and was only recently launched in late 2009. It replaced TMF and included programmes to accompany music videos such as Jersey Shore, South Park and Jackass.