Those aged 13 to 15 - and girls - suffer the most exposure to such images, which have been shown to increase the chance youngsters will start smoking or drinking, experts argue.
Writing in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, they said relatively little attention had been paid to YouTube content, which was hugely popular.
There were also few controls on digital music videos, according to the team, which included experts from the UK Centre for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies.
Vivienne Pattison director of Christian charity Mediawatch told Premier: "When they started to analyse these videos, which are incredibly popular amongst teens, especially girls, they found quite an extraordinary number of references - it's all quite subliminal really, but what it's doing is normalising these behaviours which aren't healthy.
"What we said with ratings for music videos is, okay, you can include all the sexual content you want, that's fine.
"But we're going to stick an 18 certificate on it - and that could impact the people who are going to access it.
"If you want to reach a wider audience, you're going to have to conform to some of the norms which society thinks are acceptable."
Researchers analysed the 32 most popular music videos of top 40 chart songs in the UK during a 12-week period between November 2013 and January 2014.
They worked out the total number of images, depictions and lyrics (impressions) of alcohol and tobacco content.
Surveys of more than 2,000 adults and 2,000 youngsters aged 11 to 18 were carried out in March 2014 to see how many had ever seen each of the 32 videos.
Overall, the videos produced 1,006 million impressions of alcohol and 203 million of tobacco.
Most of this content was delivered to 25 to 34-year-olds, but levels of individual exposure were almost four times higher among teens, the data showed.
Teens aged 13 to 15 received an average of 11.48 tobacco impressions, while those aged 16 to 18 received an average of 10.5. The figure was 2.85 for adults.
Exposure was around 65% higher among girls.
The highest numbers of tobacco impressions were to 13 to 15-year-olds.
