List of most expensive music videos
This page lists the most expensive music videos ever made, with costs of US$500,000 or more. David Bowie's video for the 1980 single "Ashes to Ashes" was the first music video to exceed this sum. Taylor Swift’s music video for the 2019 single ME! is the newest music video on the list. Janet Jackson leads with six videos on the list, while Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and Ayumi Hamasaki have five each. Ayumi Hamasaki, T-ara, S.E.S., 2NE1 and B.A.P are also the only Asian artists to appear on this list. Madonna has made three appearances in the top five, and four total, making her the artist with the most expensive videos of all time combined. TLC, Kanye West, Busta Rhymes, Guns N' Roses, Mylène Farmer and MC Hammer appear on the list twice. Joseph Kahn has directed seven, 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.
Romanek, who made Michael and Janet Jackson's "Scream", which was claimed to be one of the most expensive music videos 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 dollars, all of it out of Michael’s pocket."Citations
