Labels are commissioning music videos for old hits — sometimes decades old — to capitalize on their resurgence or introduce the artist to a new generation of fans.
Why It Hits: New artists rarely get the resources to make music videos these days, so giving established artists budgets for old songs shows how streaming’s catalog mindset has transformed the industry — it pays to create videos for proven hits rather than to gamble on new ones. Maybe music videos are evolving into the coolest kind of retrospective.
Behind The Videos: Generational bangers are getting music videos for a whole new generation.
Some of these videos are reviving early cuts of contemporary artists that have since become fan-favorites, such as Lucy Dacus’ “Night Shift” from 2018 and Father John Misty’s “Real Love Baby” from 2016.
Others are really reaching back in time, including LL Cool J’s “Rock the Bells” from 1985, Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” from 1977, and Peggy Lee’s “Fever” from 1958.
Since many of these songs have become iconic, they’re able to recruit in-demand talent — “Psycho Killer” was directed by Oscar-nominee Mike Mills and starred Oscar-nominee Saoirse Ronan.
That has a considerable impact — the video was viewed over a million times in 24 hours, led to an 8.8% increase in global streams for the song, and a 5.1% increase in the Talking Heads’ total catalog.
Encore: Tony Kiewel, co-president of the label Sub Pop, gave The NYT a little insight into the thinking behind making a video for “Real Love Baby.” Originally uploaded to SoundCloud, the track became Father John Misty’s most-streamed song and unexpectedly went viral on TikTok in 2023. The video, Kiewel said, “gave us an excuse to talk about the song,” since “we can’t send a press release out that says, ‘This song is viral.’” Creating a video opened up that conversation — and provided fresh material for marketing and social media clips.
Queue Up: With the continuing popularity of greatest-hits albums, it’s possible that a legacy artist could one day roll out a greatest-hits album — a big-budget visual anthology of their career.
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