The 2025 Music Video Wrap Report

For music videos, 2025 was certainly a year. And with this post, we’ll attempt to analyze it in as many ways possible.

We’ll examine music videos by the numbers and measure things like views, genres, and release dates. We‘ll look at the creative elements and count how many feature performance, narrative, dance, VFX, and of course, AI. We’ll also check the YouTube description of every video to see who credits the director and who doesn’t. The results may shock you.

To collect this data, we watched 1,101 music videos, all released in 2025. This is not a task for the weak, but we are built different.

There were many incredible videos released this year and if you read to the end you’ll find our favorites. Unfortunately, even the sacred ground of music videos couldn’t prevent the year of slop from seeping in. And not just the normal kind of AI slop that we can’t escape. But also just a lot of boring, uninspired videos that have no concept beyond “musician looks cool performing in 3 different rooms.”

Most of the videos we watched are from the US, but we also watched videos from the UK, South Korea, Puerto Rico, Philippines, Japan, Africa, Canada, Greece, Jamaica, Australia, Colombia, Ireland, India, Germany, Spain, China, Russia, Belgium, France, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, and Italy.

For anyone looking to dissociate during Christmas, we made a YouTube playlist of every video we watched, presented in order of release.

In addition to the music video data we collected ourselves, we also looked at video performance on TikTok. To get this info we relied heavily on Garbage Day’s Big Spreadsheet. As well as data intelligence sites like Statista, and trend aggregators like FOMO.

You can use the table of contents below to jump to specific sections. And with that, let’s get into the data!

People have acted oblivious to music videos since the Obama era. Even during 2012-2017, when music videos were regularly pushing the boundaries of creativity and gaining billions of views a week. You’d still find people pretending music videos died with MTV.

The myth that no one watches music videos is still going strong in 2025. This year’s version suggests that people have given up videos for TikToks and Reels. The fashion aggregators at Dazed called it a “dying art” in their best of the year post, cherrypicking a single music video getting out performed on TikTok as proof. The fact is, music videos continue to be the most consumed online video content type worldwide, “with almost half of internet users reporting to watch music videos online each week,” according to Statista.

Views are a boring stat that don’t really offer much info. They are easy to manipulate, not treated equally across platforms, and are generally a ham fisted measurement for popularity.

But in recent years, view counts have often been used as a cudgel to suggest people don’t want to watch music videos anymore. They point to the view counts in 2017 and compare them to now and declare music videos dead.

In our Vevo Bubble article from earlier this year, we outline some of why view counts surged through 2017 and then suddenly collapsed. But one reason is because music videos have the most to lose when any other content gains popularity.

Music videos invented the internet creator economy. They are the pioneers of monetizing video content online. They opened the door for a whole industry to flood into the ecosystem they helped create. When other content enters the market, music videos will naturally give up some of their share, because at one time they owned all the land.

TikToks are designed to run up views fast, because they are short and they loop. It’s a metric that inflates the perception of engagement on the platform. But even with this platform-friendly metric, when you stack the most popular music videos released this year against the most popular TikTok uploads from this year, it’s a lot more even split than the doomerism suggests.

Another thing the data on views suggests is that TikTok is tilting toward celebrity and away from user generated content. Two Tiktoks that are just part of Doechii’s “Anxiety” rollout were the most popular videos on the platform the month they were released, with one of them ending the year as the 5th most viewed TikTok of 2025. Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day sees this as a larger shift for tech platforms and media companies to play it safe in the Trump era.

All over the internet, we’re seeing a push toward safe, politically neutral content. Instagram now makes you opt in to see political content. Vimeo is in hot water for censoring their own Staff Picks. And in videos, the highest profile, most prolific directors are making the safest, most predictable videos.

It’s part of why more musicians are directing their own videos. No one is willing to disrupt the algorithm, or upset the people behind the algorithms. So now everyone says “unalived” and censors words they shouldn’t. People can’t risk having a video demonetized, or worse, deplatformed. And you see this play out in the creative trends in the videos released this year.

87% of the videos released this year were performance videos. They lean more toward dance and flashy VFX, than anything creatively challenging or time consuming, like one take videos or traditional animation. And if they do tell a story (hundreds of them did not), they they lean toward scripted narrative over organic doc style storytelling.

Friday is the most popular day of the week to release music videos online, with 39% of videos released on Friday. June 20th had the most videos released in a single day, with 18 videos. 23 of the 25 days with the most video releases this year were Friday.

This is likely rooted in the push to release a music video on the same day and date as the song release. It helps create a moment and it just makes sense to release in as many places as possible all at once. And songs and singles are released on Fridays, and so therefor so are music videos.

The Alchemist released (or was featured on) 18 music videos this year, which is by far the most. Lil Baby is in a distance but solid second with 13. Followed by NBA YoungBoy with 10 and Miley Cyrus with 9. Then Tyla, Don Toliver, YFN Lucci, and Bad Bunny are all tied with 7 videos released each. It’s a good sign to see all these artists betting hard on the art form, but for Alchemist specifically, he also released two feature length album films. One for his colab album with Hit-Boy, GOLDFISH directed by Abteen Bagheri, and one for Alfredo 2 with Freddie Gibbs, directed by Nick Walker.

We did our best to tag the genres, but it’s a pretty subjective category, and there are a lot of crossover songs out there. We also didn’t do subgenres, so we painted with a pretty broad brush. But based on what we saw, 28.5% were pop videos, 25.3% were hip-hop, and 19.2% were alternative/indie. The rest of the generes we counted were all under 10%.

You see some seasonal trends emerge in this data, with music video “season” starting around May and running through November. You see more pop videos release in the spring and summer and then tail off in the fall, where as hip-hop videos picked up a little later in the year. Alternative videos stayed pretty flat relative to the overall season.

According to YouTube’s best practices, artists should use “(Official Music Video)” as the subtitle of their music videos. However, only 45.3% of music videos use this subtitle. “Official Video” is used almost nearly as often at 40%. After that, 9.5% just use the song name with no subtitle. Then there are two regional specific subtitles, with “MV” used in Asia, and “Video Oficial” used in Latin markets. Last, there were a handful of videos that used “Music Video” or “Video,” and one single video that just used “Official.”

We found a total of 929 director credits for the 1,101 videos we watched. 674 of the credits were in the YouTube description, meaning 60.9% of music videos credit their director. For videos that did not have YouTube credits, we did our best to find the director’s name on Google or Instagram.

Some fun facts from the 929 director credits:

We gave every music video we watched a rating from 1 to 5 stars. And with this music video letterboxd, we logged a lot of mid videos. But we also found 82 great ones, and we made a playlist of all of them.

But we also wanted to narrow it down to our 20 favorite. Truly the most definitive best music videos of the year list, from the outlet that has watched all the music videos.

And we’ll let those play us out. See you next year!

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