Significant Music Videos

There are various different factors which can determine whether a music video can be considered a 'classic' including: the playtime it receives on television, the sales of that particular song, the artist themselves or the director of the video. However the main deciding factor is personal preference of the audience and the prevailing opinion of the individual.

Different sources of music reviews and critics etc have created numerous amounts of lists of what they believe is the best collection of music videos and CD covers in existence, these lists can and do vary greatly. For example the NME have provided their own list of what they think is the best 100 music videos of all time.

An example of a 'classic' music video due to the content and the artist, which received a huge amount of play time and millions of hits online would be Micheal Jackson's 'Thriller' released in 1983. In 2006 Guinness World Records listed it as the "most successful music video" due to it selling over 9 million copies. The video on YouTube currently has 194,676,565 views on the website.



A 'classic' music video appears to generally refer to a music video created previously that still remains popular in current genres/sources of viewing the video and may be considered "mainstream" music, however ultimately it is a subjective approach that defines 'classic' music videos.

Views/hits/playtime are a key component in what makes a video a classic. An example of this would be Psy's 'Gangnam style'. This was released on the 15th of July in 2012 and in 2 years it has accumulated 2,087,878,242 views and was the most watched video on YouTube for a huge amount of time.

Since this mainly involves subjective methods although statistics like sales and views etc one video that I would consider a 'classic' is Green Day's 'American Idiot'. The song was released with the album on the 20th of September 2004, but the video was uploaded on the 21st of August 2012 and since then has received over 16 million views.

In some instances, the simplicity of a video which still remains powerful in some form can be considered a classic. An example of this is Beyonce's 'Single ladies' where the choreography is the main focus of the video, which currently has over 320 million views on YouTube.