Labels Make Music Videos Of Hits Years Later

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.