Video Killed the MySpace Star: MTV's Plans to Make a Profit Off You

Remember when music videos had, well, music and video? Perhaps you've read about recent plans for MTV internet-ification. Today's news on digital music team-ups involves two big-name players, and this time it isn't the Beatles/Rock Band, Tivo/Netflix, or Wal-Mart/Wal-Mart. No, this time the advertising cooperation will be between MTV and MySpace. This program will be brought to you by Auditude, the letter $, and made possible by viewers like you.



The plan is to use Auditude technology to identify uploaded content (be it music video or other wildly popular stuff MTV Networks owns). Nothing new here; folks have already been using the "fingerprints" to make their mailing list for cease and desist newsletters. The real news is that rather than using these video identifiers as incriminating evidence, the new approach will simply provide MTV the opportunity to claim the embedded video as theirs, and pay for accompanying advertising.

Oh, and the technology also has some sort of analytics technology stuff in there, so MTV will be able to find out what their users really watch, and then, presumably, give us more of what they know we "want."

Note to MySpace and MTV: I'm no Auditude, but I do have the keen ability to identify and differentiate between music videos in a matter of seconds. I can tell the difference between

• "Don't You Want Me?" -Human League


• "Love of a Lifetime" - Firehouse


• "Take on Me" -A-Ha


• "Hungry Like the Wolf" -Duran Duran


• Anything put out by Michael Jackson


• "Safety Dance" -Men Without Hats

within a few frames.

For an additional fee, I can also probably give you a pretty good idea of the demographics of people posting and viewing the clips, not to mention which shows get posted and watched the most. Give me a call, I can guarantee that my rates are competitive.

For the best in music news and reviews, check out the TopTenREVIEWS music site. And don't forget these other groovy blog posts:

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