RAD — The Rewind Archive of Data — is the most comprehensive annotated music video research corpus ever assembled. It exists because music video as a cultural form deserves the same scholarly infrastructure that exists for film, literature, and visual art.
Every card in RAD combines two layers of annotation. The first is quantitative — brightness, contrast, saturation, color temperature, motion intensity, and scene change data extracted frame by frame across the full video duration. The second is cultural — verified director attribution, era classification, production history, genre significance, research applications, and connection mapping to related cards in the corpus.
The result is something that has never existed before: a fully queryable network of music video scholarship. Ask it for all black and white videos from 1979 to 1983. Ask it for confirmed Spike Jonze videos sorted by editing pace. Ask it for slow-cut pre-MTV promos with dark aesthetics and verified directors. The corpus answers with precision because the data is there.
The initial RAD corpus covers 1,880 curated cards spanning 1966 to 2025 — the complete output of confirmed director folders including Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, Floria Sigismondi, and Wayne Isham, plus the best selections from each decade. Every card carries a verification score and a confidence rating on all factual claims.
The full archive contains 65,000 music videos. The annotation pipeline is running continuously. The corpus grows.
Phase 1 analysis visually assesses each music video in the corpus, extracting quantitative visual data at one-second resolution across the full video duration. Phase 2 enrichment uses Claude Sonnet with live web search and strict sourcing protocols — named individuals are only documented when a direct source URL confirms their presence. A missing detail is always preferable to an incorrect one in a research corpus.
Protocol v2.1 governs all annotations in the current corpus.
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