Blackwell Reference Online

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“Music video” commonly designates a short audiovisual text in which a recorded song is accompanied by moving images. The term “music video” refers, as well, to the broader phenomenon of video clips and the television programs or networks that show them (→  Television Networks ). Research on music video has typically used the video clip as an example with which to investigate larger issues concerning the status of image and music within media forms of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It should be noted that large numbers of so-called music videos are, in fact, shot on film rather than tape-based or digital video (→  Digital Imagery ). The first wave of scholarship on music video followed shortly behind the introduction in 1981 of MTV (Music Television), a cable-based specialty television network operating in the United States (→  Cable Television ). In the 1970s, short films had been produced by the →  music industries to promote artists and recordings, through playback in record stores and on television programs typically shown late at night (e.g., Wagman 2001 ). The launch of MTV was inspired by the availability of such films, and by the enormous growth in specialty television services over the previous decade. MTV's birth and subsequent rapid rise to popularity came in a decade marked by the growth of →  cultural studies and theories of postmodernity within ... log in or subscribe to read full text