1,000 classic music videos to be remastered in HD by YouTube

Universal Music Group is remastering classic music videos for songs like Beastie Boys’ ‘Sabotage’, Janet Jackson’s ‘When I Think Of You’, and Boys II Men’s ‘End Of The Road’ as part of a project between it and YouTube. 

Nearly 100 blurry videos have already received an HD overhaul, with artists including Lady Gaga, Tom Petty, Boyz II Men, the Killers, Lionel Richie, Kiss, and the Spice Girls.

YouTube is where most people watch music videos today. However, most old videos still contain glitches and artifacts from VHS and other formats, which don’t hold up on large, modern computer screens. 

The New York Times reports that UMG reached out to directors like Spike Jonze, who was behind the iconic video for ‘Sabotage,’ in order to make sure the updated videos remained in line with the creators’ original intent. 

“The graininess of a tube television set, which is what they were going for, is not the dithery compression artifact that you can see on a highly compressed video, so cleaning it up went more to the retro intent,” Barak Moffitt, Universal’s executive vice president of content strategy and operation, noted.  

YouTube and UMG hope to remaster over 1,000 videos by the end of 2020.

Earlier this week, the Beastie Boys released a deluxe version of 'To The 5 Boroughs', which you can check out here. And last year, the iconic group released a must-read tell-all book.