What was the first music video ever made?
The music video is, unfortunately, becoming a bit of a lost art in the present landscape of the industry. When was the last time the video for a newly released song actually made a big cultural splash? There’s not one in recent memory, anyway. It’s lucky if they even make a ripple. Seemingly gone are the days of a Michael Jackson ‘Thriller’ or a Prince ‘When Doves Cry’ moment; videos, nay, events that truly shook up the cross music and visual artform.
Given that they used to hold such cultural gravitas, it is a real tragedy that they are not something which current music fans seem to be overly seeking out anymore. The rise and fall of the music video is an interesting concept – and indeed a whole other conversation – but it begs the question: what was the first music video ever made?
You may be rolling your eyes right now, scoffing that you already know the answer – it’s obviously ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ by The Buggles, isn’t it? But alas, you would be mistaken because the real truth of the matter isn’t quite as straightforward as you might imagine it to be.
Of course, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ isn’t the commonly held misconception without reason—it was indeed the first song with an accompanying video played on MTV in 1981, constituting it the first music video of our current remembered form. But 1981 was not so long ago, really, and preceding the cultural innovation that was MTV was a long history of musical and visual hybrids that all played a part in making the iteration of the music video that we all know and love.
We have to trail back almost 100 years further before the big bang of ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ to find what could be classed as the first ever kind of music video in history.
So, what was the first music video?
In 1894, two American musicians, Joseph Stern and Edward Marks, made a song called ‘The Little Lost Child’. However, with the new technological capability to create ‘moving pictures’ that had come about a few years prior, they struck gold on the idea that you could combine the two forms together and subsequently produced a moving slide show of pictures to go against the song.
It’s probably not more highly credited in the music sphere because, well, not many people saw it. Only a tiny minority of American people actually owned the technology that would allow the slide show to play, but nevertheless, excitement spread and over two million copies of the sheet music to the song were sold—which slightly defeats the point, but anyhow.
This is why The Buggles’ ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ somewhat falsely takes the crown, but as our whistlestop history lesson has demonstrated, something doesn’t come from nothing. It is worth admitting, though, that ‘The Little Lost Child’ probably wouldn’t have rocketed MTV to success had that been the first choice to grace the screen, so in that sense, they made the right call.
