The Daily Ping

This past week, MTV launched MTV Music. It’s exactly as the title says: music videos and nothing but.

To me, finding and watching videos on the web is akin to downloading pirated music (or other stuff). You will probably find what you want, but it may take a little bit of time. You’ll probably find multiple copies of it. You may find one or two that are terrible quality. And naturally, you’ll find an odd one that’s mislabeled and you’ll wonder why you’re watching the Dramatic Chipmunk for the 8,000th time. So it would make sense for a “real” music video site to offer embeddable, high resolution videos from a very wide selection.

MTV Music gets some of it right. Videos are indeed embeddable. But the selection of videos is a mystery to me. There are, for instance, two Rilo Kiley videos; the band has released at least 5 that I can think of off the top of my head. How can any Howard Jones selection be complete without “Life in One Day”, whose video made me think my VCR was broken? And zero Monkees videos? Please.

There’s one other thing: the site is ad-free, at least for me, and the interface is squeaky clean. I think that’s a huge bonus but I honestly can’t see how it’ll stay that way. MTV’s track record is to get people interested in something (ie, MTV itself) and eventually deconstruct the whole thing until it’s kind of a pile of junk only slightly related to the original thing.

So I’m enjoying it, but am also frustrated by it. Rick Astley is top-rated, too, proving that the people rating videos on the site are about 6-9 months behind the curve. (Wait until they find out about Mahir!)

Posted in Television, Movies, and Music