the history of music video's part 1 - goodwin

The relationship between music tracks and visual material dates back to the 1920s in Germany and the 1930s in America. Oscar Fischinger, for exampmle, was an experimental film maker using abstracts and visual interpretations, some of his famous works are along the lines of Kompsition in Blau (made in 1935) and Fantasia (in 1939) these famous films were early examples of music videos using classical music in the background.
Most of the time the song would be advertised at the end of the video with a title saying "get it at your local store".

Most music videos were known as 'shorties' (short films) this demonstrated talents of singers such as Billie Talent & Bing Crosby, these would usually be played on the 'panoram' (a video jukebox) in juke joints and bars around 1939-1946. These were quite heavy and small screens on the juke boxes - at the time there was very minimal censorship therefore the clips shown in the juke joints and bars were very daring sexually and politically.

This was soon followed by the Scopitone in the 60s in France. The first Scopitones were made in France in 1960, the craze soon spread throughout Europe and in particular West Germany and England, before heading over to the United States around mid-1964. By the late 1960s, the craze had died down and they were soon gone. The scopitone had choice built in, including films in colour, individual selection and play and rewind. On one jukebox there would be around 36 films - with mainly song and dance performances, which were not of high quality and usually shot on stage or outdoors. A lot of the music videos had very explicit and flashy images of women.
In the USA there were around 1000 of these machines installed by mid-1965. Films produced in the USA spent a lot of money in making films as provocative as they could get by making fantasy sets and using highly suggestive sexual dance routines - in fact these films bordered on the pornographic. The Scopitone and the panoram was in some ways the ancestor of todays music videos. The Scopitone died out and was gone when tv arrived.