Abandoned by MTV, the music video did not die; it merely mutated, clamping onto a new host: the internet. Once solely the property of television programmers, music videos have become the province of bloggers, music websites, and internet portals seeking new content. Yahoo, Google, and AOL are among the internet titans with video services that put thousands of music videos a mere click or two away. YouTube and MySpace both have grown into internet titans by virtue of their music-video holdingsYouTube's contributed by amateur collectors and band obsessives, MySpace's mostly posted by up-and-coming groups. Even MTV belatedly has gotten into the act, adding a streaming-video program with much of their video library available for perusal.
The music video has gone from being centralized in the programming of two or three cable channels to being diffused all over the internet, and what is lost in efficiency is made up for by the dazzling array of choices now available to music-video buffs. The internet is now a 24-hour music-video jukebox, with everything from the latest U2 video to obscure indie-rock clips available for viewing somewhere in the World Wide Web's wilds. In fact, indie-rock and electronica videos thrive on the internet, those genres' tech-savvy fans passing around links to their favorite acts' latest clips, or posting them on their blogs.The music video has regained some of its underground, samizdat cachet, transmitted virally from one true believer to the next. It has also become a surprisingly central application in the new-media universe, played on computers, downloaded to cellphones, and purchased on DVDs. And with the latest generation of MP3 players (like the video iPod) capable of playing video in addition to audio, music videos are now just as portable as individual songs.
If this book had been written two or three years ago, any closing thoughts on the future of the music video would have been pessimistic in nature. The music video, having been so important to an earlier generation of music fans and culturally astute teenagers and young adults, had grown stale, made obsolete by digital culture and the ever-increasing puerility of youth-centric television. Music videos had apparently had their run, and were now set to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
In the late 1990s, when MTV first began turning its back on music videos, it was the moderately popular or up-and-coming band that was hit hardest, often barred by their labels from shooting videos. Now, the worm has turned, and the music video has become a far more receptive medium for the little guys out there than for the superstars. The music video has rediscovered democracy, dispersed to the four winds of the internet. Music sites like Pitchfork and bloggers such as Sasha Frere-Jones post links to videos, fan sites and MySpace pages offer exclusive clips, and sites like YouTube offer access to thousands of music videos past and present.
And yet, the music video stands in a cultural position not dissimilar to that of the feature film prior to the success of the video-cassette recorder. Before the VCR, once a film disappeared from local theaters, it was gone for good, unless, like Gone With the Wind or some other blockbuster, it was occasionally trotted out for a re-release, or screened at a cinematheque or repertory theater. These were the rules of the game, until the VCR upended the entire system, and the entirety of film history became available to home viewers.
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