Playlist: All Your Favorite 80s Music videos

Posted By Dan on Dec 11, 2016 | 0 comments

MTV did not create the music video, but it brought all your favorite 80s music videos into prominence.

Before the creation of the music video, people only saw musicians at live shows or when they appeared on one of very few shows that featured musical acts. And even those opportunities were rare for bands or solo artists on the edgier. Some of the best 80s bands and artists simply had no place aside from the radio before music videos and MTV.

80s music videos

Here we have found a collection of some of the best 80s music videos. The songs are all classic and most of them (not all) sound as good today as they did 30-plus years ago. Sit back, listen in, or watch this soundtrack from your favorite decade.

If the video player above does not move to the next video, the full playlist is here.

The 80s were diverse

As you can tell, the 80s was in some ways a time where more musical styles hit the pop charts. That was partly because MTV made songs that radio would never have touched big hits, that radio then had to play.

It was also part of the beauty of MTV that a Madonna song could follow a Devo song which could then be followed up by a Guns N’ Roses video. It was diversity partly by necessity — at first there just weren’t that many videos. After a while MTV became as segmented as radio, but for a long time it was as random as the playlist above.

The early days of MTV were a bit wild west. It was a time when David Bowie, Elton John, and ZZ Top became even bigger stars than you could have imagined because the visual equaled the music. It was, of course, also a day when a novelty act like The Buggles could not only launch MTV with the hit “Video Killed the Radio Star,” but also become unlikely stars themselves.