MTV signed on at 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981 with a video library thin enough that the same clips came around every few hours. The first was The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star, which read as either prophecy or a joke depending on who you asked. Within three years it had stopped being funny for any label that hadn’t budgeted for a film crew. A record without a video was a record most of America would never see.

The synthesizer takes the credit for the decade’s sound and earns a fair share of it, though the range was wider than the reputation suggests. New Order’s Blue Monday ran on cold machine precision and became the best-selling 12-inch single ever pressed. Anita Baker’s Sweet Love did the opposite, unhurried and entirely human, and sold in the millions doing it. Earth, Wind & Fire had already worked out how to put a horn section and a drum machine in the same room. Power ballads shared the charts with post-punk. Country crossover sat beside synth-pop. The 1980s held all of it at once.

The charts turned genuinely global for the first time. British acts — Duran Duran, Culture Club, The Police, Wham!, Eurythmics, Tears for Fears — took American radio in a second invasion the first could not have predicted. Australia sent INXS and Men at Work. Germany sent Nena, whose 99 Luftballons reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 sung in a language almost none of its American audience understood. Ireland’s Johnny Logan won Eurovision in 1980 and built a career on it. The gatekeepers were losing their grip on who got heard.

In America the video became the campaign. Madonna treated each release as a separate piece of filmmaking, and Open Your Heart shows what that discipline looked like at full stretch. Whitney Houston arrived in 1985 with a voice that made the production around her almost beside the point. The soundtrack became a hit factory — Glenn Frey’s The Heat Is On came out of Beverly Hills Cop and outsold most of what he cut with the Eagles. And on July 13, 1985, Queen played twenty minutes at Live Aid that are still the argument-ender for what a band can do on a stage.

Below is Music Videos Club’s growing collection of 1980s videos — official releases, live performances, and television appearances — each one paired with the story behind the recording: the chart run, the studio sessions, the human details most sites skip. If you want the numbers, the Top 50 Most Watched ranks them by what people actually play. If you want to know where the decade started, 1980 is where the shift becomes visible. Browse what you remember. Find what you missed.