It depends on how you define music videos - what exactly constitutes a music video? Obviously musicians have performed music and been videoed doing so pretty much since sound and film could be synchronised - the first ‘talkie’ film, The Jazz Singer was a bit of a ‘singie’, famously featuring Al Jolson’s blackface minstrelsy. And there’s plenty of live performance footage of big band orchestras in the 1930s. So say live performance footage doesn’t count - the musicians have to be miming...well, does a mimed performance on Bandstand or Top of the Pops count? It doesn’t seem like it would, as while those performances sometimes end up being recorded and used as music videos, it doesn’t quite feel like the same thing.

So we’re looking at professionally-made films created specifically to promote a musical piece.

In this sense, you could argue that music videos have also been around for a very long time, since at least the 1950s - there are certainly pieces of feature films from the 1950s which if cut off from the rest would look a lot like music videos. In particular, films like The Girl Can’t Help It were ‘jukebox’ films which basically strung a (sometimes very) loose plot around mimed musical performances from a variety of musical artists, perhaps with elements of the loose plot occurring during the performance.

If you specify that the music video specifically has to be a short film rather than part of a bigger piece (perhaps unjustly leaving out Beyoncé’s Lemonade), well, in the late 1950s and early 1960s you get music videos made specially for the Scopitone, a kind of commercial jukebox produced in France which provided video along with the music. French New Wave cinema was on the rise in pretty much the same period that the Scopitones were all the rage, and the Scopitones often focus on artists that appeal to a French audience. Because French New Wave cinema certainly incorporate surrealist techniques, I would say that almost certainly some of these Scopitones use such effects too - broadly speaking, the Scopitones are not just focused on performance.

If the music video has to be intended for television audiences, then that starts in the mid-1960s, broadly speaking, with videos intended to replace live (often mimed) performances on TV shows like Top Of The Pops or American Bandstand, with acts like the Beatles whose busy schedule meant they could not be present on the show in person. Early examples of such films include Martha and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing In the Street’ (1964) or the Beatles’ ‘Paperback Writer’ (1966). ‘Paperback Writer’ is fairly squarely in the model of the modern music video, with some performance footage, but also simply some footage of the Beatles to mix it up. The 1967 promotional film for The Pink Floyd’s ‘Arnold Layne’ ditches performance footage for some surreal, psychedelic scenes (as you’d expect from the very psychedelic song itself).

There was also certainly a visual language which developed out of plenty of these bits and pieces for the purposes of MTV. MTV was different mostly because such music videos were not presented as a novelty between other programming, but instead as regular fare. This led to an explosion of high budget video clips that attempted to push the boundaries in search of visual spectacle, in order to make them stand out from the competition, and led to the music video being increasingly seen as an art form in itself; MTV started awarding its Video Music Awards in 1984.