Music Videos Club  ·  Curated Collection

The Videos That Defined a Decade

80s Music Videos – Top 50 Most Watched

Before the 1980s, a song lived or died on radio. A record label could spend a small fortune recording an album, and if the pluggers couldn’t get it onto the playlist at the right stations, it simply didn’t exist for most of the world. Then MTV launched on August 1, 1981, and the rules changed overnight. Suddenly a band needed a face, a look, a story you could tell in three minutes of film. The decade that followed was one of the most visually inventive — and commercially ruthless — in the history of popular music.

What the 1980s did more brilliantly than any decade before or since was collapse the distance between sound and image. A song could now arrive with a complete visual identity already attached — a costume, a set, a narrative. Adam & The Ants understood this instinctively. By the time “Stand and Deliver” hit UK number one in 1981 and stayed there for five weeks, Adam Ant had constructed an entire mythology around himself: highwayman costume, war paint, a dual-drummer sound borrowed from Burundi tribal rhythms. The music was inseparable from the image, and the image sold the music in ways radio never could.

The decade drew from an unusually wide pool of influences. British post-punk fed directly into New Wave, which in turn fed into synth-pop. American hard rock evolved into the polished, hair-sprayed juggernaut that Bon Jovi and Guns N’ Roses — despite being almost stylistic opposites — both came to represent. Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer” and Guns N’ Roses’ “Sweet Child O’ Mine” sit at numbers two and three in this collection with a combined view count approaching four billion, which tells you everything about how durably that era of rock music lodged itself into the collective memory.

Soul and R&B found new footing in the decade too. Shalamar were building their reputation as the sharpest dance act of the early 80s, and Jeffrey Daniel — one third of the group — introduced the moonwalk to British television audiences on Top of the Pops in 1982, a full year before Michael Jackson performed it at the Motown 25 gala and the world went into collective shock. Tina Turner, meanwhile, used the decade to stage one of the most remarkable comebacks in music history. By the time she was performing “Addicted To Love” live on the Break Every Rule tour, she was the highest-paid solo performer in the world. Teena Marie was writing, producing, playing every instrument, and legally rewriting the music industry’s rulebook — the lawsuit she won against Motown gave other artists, including Luther Vandross, the legal standing to walk away from contracts that had trapped them.

Country music found a wider audience than it had ever known. Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias — an odd-couple pairing that should not have worked on paper — turned “To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before” into a crossover number one that sat comfortably on both the country and pop charts in 1984. The collaboration said something important about the decade: genre boundaries were loosening, and the music video was partly responsible. When a song came packaged with a film, audiences who might never have sought it out on radio found themselves watching anyway.

Europe’s “The Final Countdown” leads this entire collection with 2.8 billion YouTube views — a number that would have been meaningless to Joey Tempest when he sketched the synth riff on a four-track recorder in 1984, two years before the band even had a record deal. Fleetwood Mac, Heart, Simply Red, Foreigner, Iron Maiden, Murray Head, Debbie Gibson, The Weather Girls — the breadth of what this decade produced is evident in a single glance at any ranked list of its most-watched videos. A hard rock band, a solo pop teenager, a disco duo, and a concept album about Cold War chess, all sitting within the same top twenty.

What the view counts confirm, four decades on, is something that anyone who lived through the 1980s already suspected: the music didn’t age the way critics predicted it would. The production sounds of the era — gated reverb drums, layered synthesizers, the particular brightness of an 80s guitar solo — stopped being embarrassing sometime around 2010 and became genuinely beloved. The videos that go with them have only grown in stature. Below is the Music Videos Club 80s collection, ranked by the numbers. The decade makes the case for itself.

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313 videos in the 80s collection  ·  Updated regularly