The music video for the 1983 hit single “White Wedding” featured a barbed-wire wedding ring, a motorcycle crashing through a stained-glass window and the singer Billy Idol unveiling his telegenic sneer. Its director, David Mallet, said it was filmed in one day, like many of the clips he did then, and aimed for a display much different from those we’re accustomed to today.

“We were making videos for a screen that the very largest was 32 inches,” Mallet said in an interview, also lamenting that a lot of video work wasn’t carefully archived. As a result, YouTube — the place most consumers watch music videos today — still has plenty of videos represented by glitchy dubs off ancient VHS tapes. “A lot of them just don’t hold up when they get blown up to 60-inch screens,” Mallet added.

On Wednesday, however, YouTube and Universal Music Group announced that they were upgrading more than 1,000 popular music videos to high definition, releasing them through 2020. Artists in the initial batch of 100 videos include Lady Gaga, Tom Petty, Boyz II Men, the Killers, Lionel Richie, Kiss, George Strait and the Spice Girls.