RSSYouTube Wants to Be Your MTV
By Ed Oswald | Published August 16, 2006, 3:43 PM
YouTube disclosed Tuesday that it has plans to eventually offer music videos from the service in an effort to continue growing its already booming user base. The site is currently in negotiations with the major music labels, and will offer the videos at no charge to users when and if the service launches.
YouTube has essentially come from nowhere to become one of the top 50 most visited sites on the Web according to Web analytics firm comScore. The site is now the 40th most visited site with 16 million users during the month of July, a 20 percent increase over the previous month.
Within one to two years, the company's goal is to have every music video ever created on the service. Such a project would be a massive effort, and require full cooperation from the music labels. Users will be able to use the YouTube functionality to add videos to profiles and Web pages, as well as comment or post reviews on the content.
Both Warner Music Group and EMI confirmed to Reuters that they were in negotiations with the social video site, however they did not specify the nature of those discussions or how far they had progressed.
Music videos may put more strain on an already taxed system that sees 100 million pageviews per day. The heavy traffic became painfully evident for YouTube Tuesday when the site's database crashed, taking the rest of the site with it.
"We did make a very intentional decision to not immediately fail over to our redundant database but to instead bring up both databases simultaneously to ensure we had absolutely no data loss," YouTube's director of product management Maryrose Dunton said of the outage.
"Although we may have lengthened the time of our outage to do this, our number one priority was to not compromise our users' content in any way," she continued. Dunton said the site would be down temporarily again on Thursday night to attempt to prevent such an occurrence from happening in the future.
You mean back when they filled the empty ad space with clips of buildings on fire and other weird stuff...it was fun for a short while...only to be severely limited by the trash that became the 80's...
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|I WANT MY MTV!! HOW'S THAT FOR NOSTALGIA?
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|YouTube is great for viewing my favourite music videos from the 80's. Ahhh the memories.
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|eigties? the years the music died?
come'n, you meant the golden era of 70's...when rock dinosaurs as Genesis, Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Doors, Jetro Tull, The Who, Queen and many many others were rolling...
omg not again 80's, with the exception of Marillion and few =)
youtube rocks, watching rare unrealeased and never seen videos of Genesis performing The Lamb Lies down on Broadway or Supper's ready made me cry... I want to cry more =D
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|Of course, I'm to be condemned for failing to mention the 70's! My humble apologies. It's just that I can't really find music videos of that era. Still, I have seen concert footage of some of my all-time favourites such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is a near masterpiece. Ahhh, further fond memories. But to say the music died in the 80's is not quite true, though you do have a good point when you see abominations such as Boy George and the Thompson Twins, to name but a few. Still, how about REM and U2? There's excellent footage of REM's first television appearance on the David Letterman Show in 1983. Simply fabulous.
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|Every era had music much better left forgotten... i mean seriously... let's compare disco to new wave...
at the same time, despite their completle lack of musical ability... soem of that stuff is still childhood nostalgia...
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|just what i need another site to support RIAA and now lose me as a client forever.. you go youtube right down the $%$%tube
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|Wait, first you say they want to be MTV, but then you say they plan to play music videos. Make up your mind, which is it?
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|The author must have been around to remember when MTV did actually play music videos! :))
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|damn, beat me to the pun ch.... i had similar thoughts...
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