A recording artist singing their popular song on film has been happening for decades and goes back as far as the film musical shorts shown in movie theaters in the 1930s and 1940s. When rock-and-roll became popular, record companies distributed promotional clips of their groups singing their hit songs to television — reaching a huge audience, because most homes in America owned a T.V. set by the 1960s.

But it was the launch of the U.S. video channel MTV in 1981 that really changed the business of music videos. MTV rotated all of our favorite artist's videos and it became one of the major ways to promote a recording star.  Soon, fans remembered the music video just as much as the song. In the early days, the videos were made on the cheap with the latest video cameras and editing equipment.

Music videos quickly became a television art form, though, with labels spending sometimes as much as $7 million dollars to film a three-and-a-half-minute song by Madonna, Michael Jackson, Duran Duran and more video vanguards. Feature film directors like John Landis and Martin Scorsese were recruited to helm these mini-movies and the music videos were shot in 35-millimeter and had film-like production values.

By the mid-1980s, MTV expanded its market by launching VH-1: Video Hits One on cable. The channel played softer music that appealed to the baby boomers who did not enjoy the range of pop, rock, and heavy metal band videos that aired on MTV.

All of Barbra’s music videos are below — beginning in 1977 with a film of her singing “My Heart Belongs to Me.” Barbra stepped into the MTV-age in 1984 with her big-budget video for “Left in the Dark,” which reunited her on the small screen with her A Star is Born costar Kris Kristofferson.

Barbra followed the music video trends, and even though she hasn't starred in a music video since 2005, Columbia Records used YouTube to present recent Streisand “lyric videos” — created for the new phone and tablet generation of fans, but still appealing to everyone. Produced and directed by innovative creatives, lyric videos are a new way to present Barbra’s music; and she's just as involved in the process, supporting the vision however she can.