History of Music Videos - Scopitones

Having done some research into the history of music videos, I found some interesting information into how music videos were shown in earlier years. The method I looked into was Scopitones.

Scopitone films are seen as the 1960 ancestors of the music videos of today. These were distributed on colour 16mm film and were made to be shown on a Scopitone film jukebox. The first scopitones were made in France in the 1960s and had spread throughout the Europe and America by 1964. However by the end of the 1960s, Scopitones ceased to exist.

With the introduction of the Scopitone came several competitors, these are explored below:


The Cinebox was an Italian film jukebox that debuted in 1959. It entered the market in Europe almost at the exact same time as the Scopitone. It entered the U.S. market in the spring of 1963, which was well before Scopitone, but was never as popular there as Scopitone. In 1965, the Cinebox was renamed Colorama in the US and in 1966, it was completely redesigned as the ultra-stylish Cinejukebox.




Another competitor to the Scopitone was the Color-Sonics. This debuted in mid-1966, with films made by Official Films at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. The jukebox used 8mm magnetic-sound film cartridges. Color-Sonics also made 16mm prints of at least some of its films so that they could be shown on a Scopitone jukebox. The 16mm prints have often faded miserably over the years.

Audience Research Ideas

The three audience research ideas that I had were:

Focus Groups - this idea would be suitable if the data that I wanted to generate was qualitative as it produces much more in depth answers and will allow me to be more analytical as opposed to answers that I would get from a survey. This is because a survey would produce more statistical information as the type of questions I would write on a survey would be close ended.

Online Polls - This method would be suitable as it would reach a much wider area, therefore the information generated would be more likely to represent the general views of everyone as opposed to focus group where it is only a small number of people. On the other hand, this may not be the case as it could create a one sided view because people that are likely to view blogs are young people. It would also be the least time consuming of the three as making a poll is quick and easy compared to focus groups and interviews.

Interviews - this idea would also generate more qualitative data as the questions asked in an interview would be open ended and allow the interviewee to elaborate on their answers. However this method is very time consuming as the most effective way of doing it would be to interview one person at a time and you are unlikely to get an accurate view of your target audience by only interviewing a small number of people. This can be a good alternative for focus groups as some people may not feel comfortable with expressing their opinions with other people.