Music Video Timeline
1905 - The nickelodeon was the first type of indoor exhibition space dedicated to showing projected motion pictures. Usually set up in converted storefronts, these small, simple theaters charged five cents for admission and flourished from about 1905 to 1915.
1940 - Soundies were a brand new form of entertainment conceived in early 1940, born in January 1941 and then suffered a lingering demise mid-way through 1947. They were three minute black and white films with an optical soundtrack designed to be shown on self-contained, coin-operated 16mm rear projection machines situated in bars, diners, nightclubs, roadhouses and other public places throughout the States and Canada.
The most widely distributed of these projectors was the Panoram, a complicated device using a system of mirrors and with a screen mounted on top of a stylish cabinet. They were made by the Mills Novelty Company of Chicago, market leaders in the manufacture of juke boxes and coin-operated machines, at the cost of $600 (about $12,000 today).
1950 - In the 1950s, Elvis Presleys film 'Jailhouse Rock' created a new generation of people; teenagers. We call this youth culture, as before the 1950s adults and children would dress the same, but when Elvis Presley starting to sing Rock and Roll music, teenagers could differentiate from adults, so they began to dress differently. Elvis was not the only factor creating youth culture but he was by far the greatest factor.
1960 - Scopitone films are the 1960s ancestors of today's music videos. They were distributed on color 16mm film with a magnetic soundtrack, and were made to be shown on a Scopitone film jukebox. The first Scopitones were made in France in 1960, and the Scopitone craze spread throughout Europe (particularly in West Germany and England) before crossing the Atlantic to the United States in mid-1964. By the end of the 1960s, they were gone.
1964 - Top of the Pops, also known as TOTP, was a British music chart television programme, made by the BBC and originally broadcast weekly between 1 January 1964 and 30 July 2006. It was traditionally shown every Thursday evening on BBC1, except for a short period on Fridays in late 1974, before being again moved to Fridays in 1996, and then to Sundays on BBC Two in 2005. Each weekly programme consisted of performances from some of that week's best-selling popular music artists, with a rundown of that week's singles chart. Additionally, there was a special edition of the programme on Christmas Day (and usually, until 1984, a second such edition a few days after Christmas), featuring some of the best-selling singles of the year.
1980 - MTV (originally an initialism of Music Television) is an American basic cable and satellite television channel owned by the MTV Networks Music & Logo Group, a unit of the Viacom Media Networks division of Viacom. The channel itself is head quartered in Los Angeles, CA, and is a subsidiary of Viacom Inc. Launched on August 1, 1981, the original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by television personalities known as "video jockeys," or VJs. In its early years, MTV's main target demographic were young adults, but today, MTV's programming is primarily targeted at adolescents and teenagers.
