The Most Featured Artists
Some artists turn up in WTV far more often than others. That is not favouritism. It reflects something real about how the 1980s worked.
The list below is generated from the game's catalogue, so it is accurate as of the last time the pages were built.
| # | Artist | Videos |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Madonna | 12 |
| 2 | Michael Jackson | 10 |
| 3 | Bon Jovi | 7 |
| 4 | Fleetwood Mac | 4 |
| 5 | Guns N' Roses | 4 |
| 6 | Heart | 4 |
| 7 | Phil Collins | 4 |
| 8 | Whitney Houston | 4 |
| 9 | AC/DC | 3 |
| 10 | Cyndi Lauper | 3 |
| 11 | Dire Straits | 3 |
| 12 | Eurythmics | 3 |
| 13 | Kate Bush | 3 |
| 14 | Modern Talking | 3 |
| 15 | Roxette | 3 |
| 16 | Spandau Ballet | 3 |
| 17 | Starship | 3 |
| 18 | The Bangles | 3 |
| 19 | U2 | 3 |
| 20 | Whitesnake | 3 |
Why the top of the list looks like it does
Madonna and Michael Jackson sit clear at the top, and between them they explain most of what the decade was about.
Both understood earlier and more completely than their contemporaries that the video was not an advert for the record. It was part of the work. Jackson demonstrated that a video could be an event in itself, something people arranged their evening around, and having proved it with "Thriller" he kept raising the stakes: longer running times, bigger directors, more elaborate choreography.
Madonna's approach was different and arguably more sophisticated. Her videos were where a persona got constructed and then dismantled and rebuilt, repeatedly, across a decade. Each one looked deliberately unlike the last. That meant a very high output of videos, each with a strong and distinct visual identity, which is exactly the raw material this game runs on.
The volume artists
Below the top two sits a group of acts appearing four to seven times each. What they mostly have in common is simple: they released a lot of singles across the 80s, and by the middle of the decade every single got a video.
This is worth understanding as a player. An artist's presence in the catalogue is not really a measure of how good they were. It is a measure of how many hit singles they had during the window when videos were being made for everything. A brilliant act with three singles will appear less often than a competent one with fifteen.
The long tail
Most artists in WTV appear once. With 188 artists across 301 videos, the average is not much above one, and that spread is intentional. A game where the same dozen acts came round repeatedly would get predictable very quickly, and the pleasure of a daily puzzle is partly in not being able to guess the shape of it in advance.
It also means the one-hit entries are, in practice, the ones that break streaks. If you find yourself in round five on something you half recognise, it is very often an act with exactly one video in the game.
What this means for your streak
Knowing the top of this list is genuinely useful. If a video resolves into something with obvious money behind it, elaborate choreography or a very deliberately constructed image, the odds are meaningfully better than random that you are looking at one of the artists near the top of this table. It is not a guarantee. But on a round-two guess with very little to go on, it is better than nothing.