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The IFTF Blog
Putting the "Music" Back into MTV
For anyone who's turned on MTV in the last ten years and said "I want my MTV back," there is hope. Sometime in the last few days, without a great deal of fanfare, the network and its parent company Viacom launched MTV Music, a site that gives music fans in the US (sorry!) access to MTV's gigantic archive of music videos, including videos from CMT and VH1.
Calling it "MTV Music" seems redundant but the last ten years of MTV have seen less music and more shows—like The Hills, Real World/Road Rules Challenge, Paris Hilton's My New BFF, and other wastes of airtime—so it almost makes sense that they'd have to add that "music" on there to distinguish this site from a site about the kind of content with which a younger group of viewers is familiar.
From MTV.com:
While MTV.com has always been a source for the latest music videos, MTVMusic.com offers up a more in-depth library, including over 16,000 videos, “Unplugged” performances and exclusive MTV concert footage. And if a video you’re looking for isn’t there yet, check back regularly as more and more vids are added daily.
In a few minutes of poking around (and there will be much, much more of that to come) I've found a few live performances from 120 Minutes, band interviews, and the pop-up video version of Michael Jackson's "Beat It."
Videos can be embedded like any normal video site and there are direct links to the videos on the left hand side as well. They've also included social features like rating and commenting, and icons to post a video to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, etc. If you make an account, you get a profile—to which you can add your favorite videos—and access to the MTV Music social networking stuff, which isn't particularly interesting because I don't have any friends yet.
A nice little touch I particularly liked... when you load the site, if you click on the image in the middle that says "I want my MTV Music" (with a TV and a set of pink speakers) it takes you to The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," paying homage to the first video ever played on MTV. And here it is...
Meanwhile, it looks like Universal Music Group wants to hug it out with the other labels and build its own hub for music videos.
UPDATE: Anthony Townsend pointed out that there are 8 different legal docs related to making a user account. Most notably is the one in which MTV claims rights to use any user-uploaded content any way they want without paying any royalties to the user.