List of most expensive music videos
This article lists the most expensive music videos ever made, with costs of $500,000 or more, from those whose budgets have been disclosed.
David Bowie's video for the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes" was the first music video to exceed this sum. Janet Jackson and Britney Spears have six videos each on the list, while Michael Jackson and Ayumi Hamasaki have five each. Madonna has made three appearances in the top five, and five total, making her the artist with the most expensive videos of all time combined. TLC, Mariah Carey, Kanye West, Busta Rhymes, Guns N' Roses, Mylène Farmer and MC Hammer appear on the list twice.
Joseph Kahn has directed seven, Paul Hunter has directed four, while Hype Williams, Cha Eun Taek and Wataru Takeishi have directed three. Nigel Dick, Mark Romanek and John Landis appear twice, the latter with videos both for Michael Jackson. This list only includes music videos with an announced or reported budget.
The only pre-1980s video on the list is "Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya" by Naushad, Shakeel Badayuni and Lata Mangeshkar. Sophie Muller's 2016 video for "Make Me Like You" by Gwen Stefani is both the most expensive music video directed by a woman and the most expensive music video of the 2010s, while "Feelslikeimfallinginlove" by British band Coldplay is both the most expensive music video by a non-American artist and the most expensive music video of the 2020s. Hamasaki's videos for the Japanese-language songs "My Name's Women" and "Fairyland" are tied as the most expensive non-English-language music videos. Madonna's videos for "Express Yourself" and "Die Another Day" are respectively the most expensive videos of the 1980s and the 21st century.
Romanek, who made Michael and Janet Jackson's "Scream", which was claimed the most expensive music video ever made, has since denied this claim, saying that there were two other music videos from the same era which cost "millions more" than "Scream". In a 2017 interview, Mick Garris, a writer for Michael Jackson's Ghosts stated that after several years of production development for the Ghosts short film: "It became the most expensive music video ever made...it ended up coming in at about $15 million, all of it out of Michael's pocket."