It was American electrician-slash-photographer George Thomas who was the first to put images to music and match them. His ‘illustrated song’ – a series of still images printed onto glass slides, coloured in by hand and projected onto a screen alongside a live musical performance – made song-book publishers Edward B. Marks and Joe Stern’s number, The Little Lost Child, a massive hit back in the music halls of 1894.
People like Oskar Fischinger in the 1990's helped build on the music videos. Oskar Fischinger was an animator who's work accompanied music - this at the time was called visual music.
I 1940 Disney created Fantasia based around famous pieces of classical music conducted by Leopold Stokowski; seven of which are performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra. Other earlier, but less successful, musical animations were 'Silly Symphonies'.
In 1956 Tony Bennett was filmed walking along the Serpentine in Hyde Park, as his song 'Stranger in Paradise' was played, this was then distributed to play on TV stations and lead to Tony Bennett claiming he made the 'first' music video.
In 1960 France a visual jukebox had been created and was being used to create short films for French artists to accompany their songs. This spread to other countries where similar machines were uses - like Cinebox in Italy.
However, the defining work in modern music videos was The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night where musical segments of the film/video set up the basic visuals of the modern music video.
Also Bob Dylan's 1966 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' used the "random" performance of the celebrity, Allen Ginsberg, in a non-preforming role. This has been imitated by many other music videos since.
In the 1970's Top of the Pops(created in 1964) was being used to promote a video and if the video was good and well received by the public they would go out and buy it so that they could see the video again the next week. Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' also started a new era where artists started using their music videos for promos.
The 1980's saw the launch of MTV(1982) a satellite channel specifically for music videos. The first music video to be aired on this was The Buggles 'Video Killed the Radio Star'.
The mid 1980's showed artists using more sophisticated effects and adding a storyline or plot to their music video - like in Michael Jackson's Thriller where it is actually a 13 minute music video and around a 3-4 minute song.
Also since Top of the Pops was censored artists decided they would use another approach to music videos, which was to produce a promo or video that would have to be banned or edited to be fit for Top of the Pops, so that the resulting controversy and publicity would sell the release of the single or album. Examples of this is Frankie Goes To Hollywood 'Relax' and Duran Durans 'Girls Gone Wild'.
Music videos in the mid-1980's became a central role in the marketing of a band or single.
Although MTV is now more focussed on reality shows than music, the Internet has picked up where TV has waned, and, since 2005, YouTube is now the first port of call for anybody searching for their favourite artist’s latest video. The video for Lady GaGa’s hit, Bad Romance (which owes more than a nod to Thriller) became, in 2010, the most-viewed video not only on YouTube, but on the entire Internet. And now, thanks to smartphones, more people than ever check out videos anywhere, anytime.