Mtvmusic.com is Launched

Here's an embarrassing admission: when I was younger and first saw U2's video for New Year's Day, you know the one where they're playing in the snow in a clearing, I thought, "Man, they dragged generators all the way to the middle of nowhere so they could film this video, that must have been expensive." It wasn't until I read a Rolling Stone article on MTV after that I learned no one really played in videos. DOH!

MTV really was actually relevant once, a channel people really did watch. It showed real music videos of artists from many genres and was actually a go-to place to learn about current music and music news. It exposed little known acts to kids like myself who lived in little-known towns, an exposure that we probably wouldn't have had otherwise (radio stations in upstate NY weren't prone to sandwiching a lot of Roxy Music or INXS between REO Speedwagon and Pink Floyd in their rock blocks back then). In MTV's early years, it actually was pretty interesting. I'd even wager a guess that early MTV played a definitive role in creating the music snob who proverbially stands before you today because it let me know there was other music out there besides the assorted radio tripe of the day like REO Speedwagon and Pink Floyd.

Well for a little trip backwards in time, the NY Post reported the other day that MTV has now posted nearly every video ever played on MTV online for free viewing. Hopefully they left out that never-ending spew of those by Hall and Oates. I swear, they were on just as much as the VJs.

You want your MTV? Now you've got it.

More than 22,000 music videos - nearly every video that's ever been played on MTV - are now available free on one new Web site.

It might be the biggest collection of music videos ever to be assembled in one place on the Web.

The new site is called mtvmusic.com, and its launch, which MTV considers to still be in the testing stage, has not even been formally announced.

But the secret's out. The site went online Monday, although it is not currently linked to any other MTV sites.

Besides the 22,000 videos from MTV's co-owned music networks - MTV, VH-1 and CMT - the site has an estimated 5,000 other pieces of content, including interview segments culled from the networks' shows.

"It's our way of opening up our vast storehouse," said an MTV spokesman who emphasized that the site is a work in progress. "Most of the things that are on there are things that have been on CMT, VH-1 or MTV's Web sites at some point."

So far, the bare-bones site carries no ads, although they might be added later.