The Music Video Library
I’m proud to announce the release of The Music VIdeo Library!
Why I Built the MVG Library (and What's Actually In It)
I've spent the last few years on Instagram breaking down music videos — the lighting, the lenses, the little decisions that make a video work. And every single time, someone asks the same question in the comments: "who directed this?" "what's this song called?" "wait, is this the same DP as [other video]?"
For the longest time my answer was: I don't know, let me go dig through YouTube descriptions and old press releases and hope someone tagged it right. That's insane. This information exists — it's just scattered across a thousand corners of the internet, half of it wrong, none of it searchable.
So I started keeping my own list. A spreadsheet, if I'm being honest. Then the spreadsheet got big. Then it got unmanageable big. And at some point I realized: if I want this, other people who care about music videos as a craft — not just content, an actual art form — probably want it too.
That's the MVG Library. It's a searchable database of music videos, indexed the way I always wished one existed: by director, by artist, by song. Right now it's sitting at over 13,000 entries and growing every week.
The Music Video Library home page
What it actually does
Search by the person who made it, not just the song. Type in a director's name and see everything they've made. Same for artists. I built it this way because directors are so often the invisible hand in a video that blows up — I wanted a place where their name is the front door and not just a footnote.
Spotlight and Featured picks. I curate a small rotating set of videos I think deserve extra eyes — stuff that's brilliant but underseen, or just something I'm obsessed with that week. It's not an algorithm. It's just me.
TV Mode. Sometimes you don't want to search, you want to just watch. TV Mode shuffles through whatever's currently matching your filters — flip it on, let it play, discover something.
It's built for your phone. Most people are going to hit this from Instagram, on mobile, mid-scroll. So the whole thing is designed mobile-first — fast, thumb-friendly, no fighting a desktop layout squeezed onto a 6-inch screen.
You can submit videos. This library only gets good if it's a group effort. If there's a video with real credits — a director, a DP, a story behind it — that isn't in here yet, there's a submission form right on the site. I review everything that comes in.
Submit from within the site
Why this, why now
Honestly? Because 90-second Reels aren't enough to actually explain a revolution. I love talking about music videos, but a caption can only do so much — I wanted something that outlives the algorithm's attention span. A place people can come back to, search, get lost in for twenty minutes. Something with actual permanence.
This is also the first piece of something bigger I'm building — the podcast, the deeper dives, the long-form stuff Carla and I have been putting together. The library is the reference shelf underneath all of it.
What's next
This thing is never "done." I'm adding new entries constantly, fixing credits when people flag something wrong, and slowly filling in the gaps in music video history that nobody else bothered to write down. If you've got a favorite video and you don't see it in there — or worse, you see it with the wrong director credited — tell me. That's exactly the kind of thing this was built to fix.
Go poke around. Search your favorite director. See what comes up.
