Music Video History - Soundies

Soundies were the early version of today's music video, they were founded in the 1940s. They were generally 3 minutes long and produced in America. Soundies covered all types of music such as: Classical to big band swing, hillibilly novelties etc. These soundies were glorious little capsules of musical history but sadly wartime restrictions stopped people from watching soundies, the number of soundies used after 1946 dropped from 10,000 to 2,000.

That may have been the end of Soundies but channel 4 did a series called "The jazz package" in the summer of 1993. Now the only place to find Soundies is in second hand record stores.

Audience Research.

1) I could make a questionnaire, a little tick box system then maybe make a graph of the result, this would give me quantitative data.

2) I could sign up to a music forum an start a thread on: http://www.muzicforums.com/

3)Finally i could approach our target audience outside places they are known to congregate such as HMV or Topshop etc... i would ask them what there favourite music genre is and why, then mark it on a tally, i would film this then edit it.

After doing all of this i could cross reference the results and find out what the perfect music video would be and why.