Over the decade to follow, countless artists would follow their examples, with music videos both casual and epic that managed to cut through the Internet’s content overload and capture the national imagination like the Buzz Clips of yore. The music video might never achieve its golden-age omnipresence again, but when done right, it could still be just as impactful.īillboard's 100 Songs That Defined the Decade It was also just a few weeks after Justin Bieber, a rising sensation who became a teen idol on YouTube before ever having a song on the radio, had released the much simpler but equally starmaking bowling alley love story clip for “Baby” - which would cement his ascent to the A-list and quickly become the most viewed video in the platform’s history. That was the month that “Telephone” - the team-up between the artists who were then the two greatest icons of contemporary music video, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé - dropped as a headline-grabbing, attention-captivating ten-minute mini-movie, enrapturing pop fans around the globe and driving millions and millions of views.

While the music video suffered an unfortunate slide in relevance over the late ’00s, as MTV and VH1 gradually cut videos from their programming and YouTube was still finding its footing as an international platform, it was pretty clear as of March 2010 that the artform would survive and thrive into the next decade.

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