Prior to working at The Iona Group and spending time freelancing doing flash game development and other assorted web design tomfoolery, I designed websties for Rollingstone, Downbeat, TheSource, Tunes.com and Emusic. It was a great gig. Lots of fun. Fun people, great music, awesome subject matter. Then the dotcom bomb hit. I was laid off along with virtually everyone in my Chicago office. That said, I (was) am a huge music fan. Love the feel of a new set of tracks. Love buying tunes, love downloading them love the feel of a new, well packaged disc when I get one. I have a iTunes library that would span a couple iPod classics. I am a completist. I have all of Nine Inch Nails stuff. Suicidal Tendencies. Pavement. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. Poster Children. Guided By Voices (I’m not sure if I actually have all of this… does anyone?) TRS-80, Muse, Radiohead. I also love when a new music site launches. Pitchfork, Pandora, Last.fm, all of em. I like music blogs (music for robots ftw) and love to watch videos online.

You get the picture. I love music.

As a music fan, a flash designer with a strong interest in social media and RIA design, and as someone who has worked on and designed major music portals in the past, you can probably connect the dots and see that when a new music site launches, or redesigns (btw, Rollingstone.com is looking pretty good lately) I’m all over it. So when mtvmusic.com launched recently, you can probably guess I was all over it. After a few days of surfing, spending a couple hours sampling some of my favorite videos from over the years, I have to say over all… A really good effort for a first version of a site like this. What do I like?

1. Deep content – Most bands/artists I looked up had more than just their biggest hit available. Helmet, Faith No More and Tribe Called Quest all had deep cuts available for viewing. Nice work.
2. A minimalistic uncluttered design – By and large, they avoided MTV-ing it. It focuses you on the video and is not overly junked up with other animated or large elements.
3. A solid player – I have yet to experience an error with the Flash player controlling the videos.
4. An API - With the help of the Mashery, they have published an API to allow you to access and search the library at MTVMusic
5. A sprinkling of user community  features throughout РYou can comment on and favorite videos, create a custom user profile URL and do a couple other standard social networking type things.
6. There is finally a way to watch videos on MTV again. Yay!

However, there are some key tings that need to be improved upon in order to really live up to the MTV brand with this new site.

1. Expose more content while you are viewing a video. After choosing a video to view, you no longer have access to any other tracks that artist has in the system, no other songs that may have been charting at the same time that that one was or other key cuts in that genre. The content at the media asset view level is primarily user comments (blecch, who cares about the 42nd person to say “I love the Talking Heads” on Once In a Lifetime?) and a large ad for a featured old school video like “Welcome to the Jungle” or Madonna’s “Like a Prayer”… I would think some contextualization and exposing of related content would lead to a much longer user experience and wikipedia like deep surfing session as the user jumps from video to video.
2. Absence of MTV History on the video content. Really, the only editorial content on the site is some cribbed Allmusic bios. Weak. We don’t need another allmusic.com, we already have a great one, allmusic.com. Dig out the archives and make note of what makes that Prodigy or Fat Boy Slim video notable. I’m sure that that info still exists somewere, get on it!
3. The player and site has no playlist/shuffle functionality. – There is currently no mechanism in the site to simply “watch MTV”. You watch one video and then mus search or browse to another video. With the lack of video navigation cues on the site, you can guess that this leads to a pretty disjointed experience.
4. Lack of the best music shows the network had. Yo! MTV Raps, Headbanger’s Ball and 120 Minutes could easily be recreated here, complete with episode lists done chronlgically containing the playlist for the show. Wanna see what Rikki Rachtman was rocking out to in the summer of 1991? No problem! Now, let me be clear… I don’t want old reruns of the show up there, I just want the videos.
5. The API is half baked. No direct links to the video files themselves for integration in custom Flex/Flash apps. No genre search. Metadata search about the videos is very very limited. There is currently no exposed way to search for Spike Jonze videos, for example. There is no way to find videos from 1983. No way to find metal videos. On and on. A stronger API would allow developers to add the features like playlists, etc before the site actually does, so it’s really in their best interests to get this rolling.
6. The videos appear to be encoded as FLV. If the videos were available as H.264 clips, you could get MTVMusic on your iPhone, Apple TV or any number of other mobile/settop boxes. As it is right now, you need the Flash player. Bummer. Beyond that, some of the tape transfers are pretty bad. Lots of scanlines, interlacing and macroblocking like artifacts are apparent on some of the older clips.

I’m sure I could pick some other +’s and -’s about the site out if I spent a bit more time writing this, but you get the idea… a great start, but still in need of so much in order to really jump to the top of the pile. I’m sure they have their eyes set on youtube (obviously with the comments taking center stage on the video’s screen), but I would caution against blindly adding social media content just to keep up with Google. Really, I just want my MTV, so anyway they can help that happen is probably to their advantage.

Posted on November 2, 2008

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