A2 Music Videos Introduction

Music videos where first popularised by the television channel MTV (music television). This channel was the first television channel introduced for only showing music videos, however nowadays due to the increased use of the internet and sites like youtube, MTV has pretty much stopped showing music videos alltogether. The first video shown of MTV was 'Video killed the radio star'  by the Buggles. The start of MTV increased the popularity of music videos, before the 80's music videos generally just contained performace footage, but increasingly nowaday videos are a mixture of performence and narrative combined into one video. Also MTV's videos where targeted at a teenage audience so things like editing became much more fast paced to appeal more to the target audience.

Music videos often contain alot of post-modernism and a high degree of intertexuality. The music video for Micheal Jackson's 'Thriller' greatly referenced An American werewolf in london. This is due to the director bieng the same. This video for Thriller was 13 minutes long practically making it a short film and featured a narrative. However this is also a good example of old fashioned style of editing with super long takes of over 30 seconds long.

The great advantage of using music videos in our courrswork is the ability to take ideas from every form of media. From films, magazines and television there is alot of post-modernism involved.