Research and Planning- The 1920s to 1950s.

In 1926 short music videos were typically six minutes in duration, and featured Art Deco-style animations and backgrounds combined with film of the performer singing.

Early 1930s cartoons featured popular musicians performing their hit songs on-camera in live-action segments during the cartoons. The early animated films by Walt Disney were based around music, such as Fantasia, which featured several interpretations of classical pieces.

Later, in the mid-1940s, musician Louis Jordan made short films for his songs, some of which were pieced together into a feature film Lookout Sister.  According to music historian Donald Clarke these films were the ‘ancestors’ of the music video. Another early form of music video was one-song films called "promotional clips" made in the 1940s for the Panoram visual jukebox. These were short films of musical selections, usually just a band on a movie-set bandstand, made for playing.

From the 1930s to the 1950s music films became very popular and there have been many modern day adaptations of the classic Hollywood musicals.