Music videos have been being made since the mid 1960s and had their breakthrough in the mid 1970s. Since then it has been the main marketing tool for breaking new pop and rock artists in the international market. When MTV opened on August 1st 1981 by showing the video Video Killed the Radio Star (Russel Mulcahy, 1979) it was prophetic programming. Within a couple of years MTV was the main source for an artist to reach the American market. The enormous success of Michael Jackson and Madonna in the 1980s was at least partly caused by their clever use of the music video medium. Since then almost all pop and rock artists have music videos. The prestige of the medium has been variable, since the first golden period in the 1980s to the subsequent loss of this prestige in the 1990s. However new dance music, rap and hip hop have continued to use it extensively, and there is a new attention given to the videos in the last 10 years, both as an underground phenomenon, an internet medium and as traditional advertising for popular music.

While animated images to music have been made all through film history, the animated music video did not arrive until the mid 1980s with highlights like Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel and Take on Me by A-ha. They initiated what I call the first golden age of animated music video. Many of the best and most celebrated music videos are animated. I believe there is a correlation between animation and music video quality. Sledgehammer and Take on Me are always high on lists of ‘best music videos ever’. Many of the other videos on the top of such lists are animated as well. In the first part of this essay I will discuss the surprisingly late arrival of the animated music video and the quality of the animated music videos of the late 1980s.

In the 1990s, when the prestige of the music video format declined, the animated music videos virtually disappeared. In the last decade they have come back with magnificent animated music videos by directors and producers like Michel Gondry, Jonas Odell, Jonathan Dayton/Valerie Faris, Shynola and H5. The last part of this essay will discuss these new animated music videos and compare them with the ‘classic’ videos of the first golden age.
Using a triangle model for analyses of music videos (Strøm 1989, Strøm 1995) an argument will be made that both groups of golden age videos belong to the concept kind of music videos (as different from concert and collage videos) and where the directors (more than the artists or the record companies) are the major creative reason for the success of the videos.

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