A music video is a short film or video that accompanies a complete piece of music/song. Modern music videos are primarily made and used as a marketing device intended to promote the sale of music recordings. Although the origins of music videos go back much further, they came into their own in the 1980s, when MTV based their format around the medium, and later with the launch of VH1. The term "music video" first came into popular usage in the early 1980s. Prior to that time, these works were described by various terms including "filmed insert", "promotional (promo) film", "promotional (promo) clip" or "film clip". In Chinese entertainment, music videos are simply known as MTVs because the network was responsible for bringing music videos to its popularity.

Music videos use a wide range of styles of filmmaking techniques, including animation, live action filming, documentaries, and non-narrative approaches such as abstract film. Some music videos blend different styles, such as animation and live action.

Antecedents: 1910s–1950s

Musical short films were made by Lee De Forest in 1923–24, followed by thousands of Vitaphone shorts (1926–30), many featuring bands, vocalists and dancers. In the 1920s, the animated films of Oskar Fischinger (aptly labelled "visual music") were supplied with orchestral scores. Fischinger also made short animated films to advertise Electrola Records' new releases. In 1929, the Russian Dziga Vertov made the 40-minute Man with the Movie Camera, an experiment on filming real, actual events.

Sergei Eisenstein's 1938 film Alexander Nevsky, used extended scenes of battles choreographed to a score by Sergei Prokofiev, a score that had already been composed before shooting began, so that the scene could be edited in accordance with the music.

Animation artist Max Fleischer introduced a series of sing-along short cartoons called Screen Songs, which invited audiences to sing along to popular songs by "following the bouncing ball". 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, his Silly Symphonies, were built around music. The Warner Brothers cartoons, even today billed as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, were initially fashioned around specific songs from upcoming Warner Brothers musical films. Live action musical shorts, featuring such popular performers as Cab Calloway, were also distributed to theatres.

Blues singer Bessie Smith appeared in a two-reel short film called St. Louis Blues (1929) featuring a dramatized performance of the hit song. It was shown in theatres until 1932. Numerous other musicians appeared in short musical subjects during this period. Later, in the mid-1940s, musician Louis Jordan made short films for his songs, some of which were spliced together into a feature film Lookout Sister; these films were, according to music historian Donald Clarke, the ancestors of music videos.