Every year of music video has a look you can feel before you can name. This measures it. Energy, color, contrast, and cutting speed, read off more than 7,000 videos and traced across five decades.
Aggregated from the RAD archive's per-video visual analysis, 1975 to 2025. Each value is the yearly average on a 0 to 100 scale.
Watch the thread move. Energy and contrast climb into the golden MTV years and peak in the mid-90s. Color saturation drains out in the 2010s as the muted, cinematic indie look takes over. Some dimensions drift, some hold steady, and together they are why a year sounds and looks like itself.
Set the dial to any year and see its visual DNA, measured against the all-time average, plus its dominant storytelling mode and the tags that defined it. Then go hear it.