NEW YORK - AUGUST 31: The group OK Go performs onstage at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall August 31, 2006 in New York City. (Photo by Scott Gries/Getty Images) 
Music videos have all the right ingredients to be viral: they’re short, meaning more budget per second, and they’re easy to stream online; and unlike movies, there is commercial incentive for their creators to disseminate them as much as possible – the success of pop giants like Michael Jackson and Madonna was largely due to their strategic use of music videos as a medium.
Despacito by Luis Fonsi ft. Daddy Yankee has been viewed on YouTube more than 6.5 billion times. And nine of the 10 most viewed videos of all time are music videos. Outside of the repetitive commercial pop and hip-hop which dominates the web, there are many music videos that utilise the versatile medium in unique, innovative ways. What follows in this article is not a list of groundbreaking classics, which influenced music videos as a genre, (that’s a list for another day), but rather our pick of some of the most creative modern videos which have been produced since.
Needing/ Getting
width="853" height="480" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"> OK GO are without a doubt the big daddies of music videos; it all started with four dudes geeky dancing on some treadmills and this list could easily have been filled with any of their numerous intricate off-the-wall masterpieces. Ten years ago, the four artists nerd-rocked YouTube with Here It Goes Again, a simple one-take video of four guys performing quirky choreographed dance moves on moving treadmills.
Since then, they have one-upped themselves with every single they’ve released. Their music video for Needing and Getting is made using the world’s first musical race-track.
In it, the band drives a car kitted out with mics, rods and all sorts of paraphernalia through a racetrack in the desert filled with pianos, barrels and anything else they could think of to produce the melody. Damian Kulash, the singer at the wheel, took stunt driving lessons and the whole production took four months and 155 takes to get it right. The resulting video is astounding, and the song is rather nice too. If this is your first time flying with OK GO, start out with Upside Down & Inside Out (filmed in zero-gravity), The One Moment (filmed in 4.2 seconds and slowed down), and Obsession (stop-frame animation using 567 printers).
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