Writing about the form

Music video credits have always been an afterthought — buried in the YouTube description, absent from streaming metadata, sometimes missing entirely from commercial releases. We think that's worth fixing, and here's how we approached it.

The visual album section took about two years to get to a state we were happy with. Along the way we made a lot of decisions — about what qualifies, how to handle international releases, when to split a director's entry into multiple works.

The Barcelona-based duo have been making some of the most rigorous work in the form for a decade, and almost none of it has been written about in depth. We spent a month with their catalog trying to understand why.

About 800 of the videos in our archive predate widespread digital distribution. How we found them, what quality we settled for, and what's still missing.

We started SpectraVid in February 2020 with a shared hard drive and a spreadsheet. Five years later, the archive has 8,400 videos and 3,200 members. Some things went as we expected. Most didn't.