Every music video is an artifact. RAD is the structural record.
The MTV launch year (1981) marks the sharpest single-year increase in documented visual output.
Tier I landmarks concentrate in 1984–1994 — the decade music video became a distinct art form.
Click any card. The depth reveals itself.
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Found in scholarship
Timeline — corpus by year
▪ Pre-MTV (–1980)
▪ MTV era (1981–1995)
▪ Post-MTV (1996–)
About
What RAD is
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 combines two layers of annotation. The first is quantitative — brightness, contrast, saturation, color temperature, motion intensity, and scene change data extracted frame by frame. The second is cultural — verified director attribution, era classification, production history, genre significance, 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 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.
Culture deserves preservation on its own terms — before the algorithm decides what gets remembered.
The Rewinder
7,138 videos · 1966–2025
The Rewinder
the archive's memory. 7,138 videos, fully annotated. ask me anything — a director, an era, a video you half-remember, a genre you can't name.