Steven Spielberg shoots his first music video using an iPhone

If you're wondering if you can use your iPhone to shoot a music video, Steven Spielberg is showing you how. He directed his first music video for Mumford and Sons' Marcus Mumford and his new single Cannibal. They shot it in a school gymnasium in New York. 

Spielberg worked with his wife Kate Capshaw as the producer, art director, and dolly grip. Some behind-the-scenes footage shared by Mumford shows Spielberg being pulled along by Capshaw in a wheeled chair to achieve some of the shots. If you've been waiting for the signal to make your own music video/film, here's your sign to know it's possible to do it with your phone. (We don't know what iPhone model Spielberg used, though.)

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K-pop group BTS becomes first to rack up 100 million YouTube views in 24 hours

K-pop stars seem to be the leaders in breaking YouTube viewing records. This time around, BTS garnered 101.1 million views for its new music video, "Dynamite," in 24 hours. They break Blackpink's record of 86.3 million and become the first act to cross the 100 million view mark in a short timeframe. It's a significant leap fro the group's last video, too, which got 74.6 million in the same period. The video also broke the record for most-watched YouTube premiere with over three million simultaneous viewers.

As Engadget points out, this number should represent real, organic views, as YouTube has stopped counting paid ad views for 24-hour tallies back in September 2019 to prevent labels from artificially inflating figures.

Mark Ronson makes first Instagram Story music video

Grammy-winning producer Mark Ronson partnered with Sony Music and Instagram to release the first-ever interactive music video on the platform's Stories feature. The video was for "Pieces of Us," a song featuring King Princess and off his new album, Late Night Feelings. The phone-filmed video was made specifically for Instagram Stories. With this feature being designed to be temporary, the video will appear in consecutive 24-hour cycles, each offering the viewer a different kind of interaction. Fans are encouraged to engage by adding polls, lyric stickers, and new Augmented Reality filters into their own Stories. Ronson has been incorporating the fan-made versions into his Stories in what Fast Company describes as "some sort of electro-beat, sticker-covered ouroboros." Eventually, the full video will be available on Ronson's IGTV.

Universal Music Group and YouTube are remastering iconic music videos in HD

Expect to see music videos from the likes of Janet Jackson, Lionel Richie, and Lady Gaga to get a visual quality bump over at YouTube. Universal Music Group and YouTube have partnered to bring up to 1,000 videos from standard definition to HD by the end of 2020. The HD videos will take the place of the original versions both on YouTube and YouTube Music. These will maintain the same URLs, view counts, and likes as before. One way to know if the video has been remastered is you’ll see a #Remastered label or “Remastered in HD!” in the description. A lot of these videos weren’t shot in HD, but remastering will make these videos noticeably clearer.

As The Verge points out, let’s hope other labels follow suit and help preserve their archives. A recent New York Times report detailed how the 2008 Universal fire burned through original master tapes of classic albums.