Interestingly, you should (if you don’t already) also know of the other Blow project that never quite got off the ground, but the evidence of which is all over YouTube: a collaborative video piece for “Pile of Gold,” consisting entirely of fan submitted videos posted via YouTube. The idea was to put the videos together and play them behind Khaela while she was on tour, but the whole thing fell apart because she couldn’t find a way to download the videos off YouTube. Which is, of course, both a refutation of YouTube (I can’t get content off it!) and a triumph (look at all these fans who managed to make a music video and get people to watch them!)

One last thing: I think YouTube 2.0 will come faster than you think. The major limiting factor is bandwidth, and that’s increasingly only a problem in North America, as more densely-populated areas like Japan, Korea and western Europe gain access to 10Mbps+ connections. I sincerely find it hard to believe the music video industry will be dead before someone comes up with a high-bandwidth version of YouTube. In fact, arguably early versions are here now.

YouTube hasn’t exactly wiped out the music video ecosystem, mainly because there wasn’t one to begin with. It’s not as though there were plenty of places to download music videos before YouTube came along anyways, so the idea that we used to be able to download high-quality versions of all your favourite videos is mostly false. That is, unless you count the ripped versions of music videos from the likes of MTV. Other than that, distribution of high-quality QT and AVI videos was scattershot at best.

I lump Quicktime in with AVIs and the like because there are issues with Quicktime codecs as well. MP4 files can be just as troublesome, if my experience has been any indication. MOV files “just work” if you’re using iTunes/Quicktime or VLC/MPlayer, but not everyone has either—mostly Windows platforms. But I do agree with you that Quicktime is, on the whole, easier to deal with.

Finally, the other crucial difference between our viewpoints. Based on your discussion of budgets and special effects, I’m guessing your perspective (and 30frames as well) is from a very different area of the music industry than mine. Most of the bands I listen to, in an earlier age, wouldn’t bother with music videos at all because there’d be no chance in hell of them ever being played by the gatekeepers. The same television-based system that allows Gwen Stefani to shoot extravagant videos costing tens of thousands (hundred of thousands?) of dollars also prevents most smaller, independent bands from ever getting any substantial airplay. If a band is lucky, they get maybe a couple of plays on MTV2 when the video is new.

Nearly all of my favourite videos on YouTube are videos I would never have seen on television—videos like the full nine-minute version of Saint Etienne’s “How We Used To Live,” a video that’s been at several music video festivals but is “too long.” Or Sleater-Kinney’s “Get Up,” shot by Miranda July, who recently directed Me and You and Everyone We Know. If the internet hadn’t come along and the general trend towards investing only in surefire winners continued, these sorts of videos would cease to exist altogether.

I agree that record labels should absolutely be posting higher quality versions of their videos on their own sites; that’s just common sense (why throw away an asset that could possibly bring in money?). But I never expect the major labels to exhibit anything resembling common sense. And besides, from what I’ve seen YouTube has vastly increased the audience for music videos despite the low quality. How can this ever be a bad thing, even taking into account your concerns? At worst, it means no one shoots glitzy, glamorous videos because it turns out the audience doesn’t really care. But I don’t think that will happen, so long as people continue to buy Director’s Label DVD sets full of music videos they could just watch on TV—or on YouTube, for that matter.

My point is that, no, there is a line. Everything would be peachy if YouTube were just *one* method of seeing those videos. Instead, it seems to be the *only* way anybody can see a music video these days. Therein lies the problem. Music videos suddenly become the art form of compression artifacts, indecipherable facial expressions, and out-of-synch sound. That is, music videos start ceasing to be an art form. Combine this with the fact that music videos were *dying* from cut budgets already, and you have trouble for the long-term viability of the craft.

Your post has a few straw-men. MP3 compression is on a completely different planet from YouTube compression when you consider the quality relative to the limits of human perception. Mp3 isn’t perfect, but it’s in the 90th percentile in terms of people being able to notice. YouTube is failing miserably, especially as HD content becomes more prevalent. And the whole DivX, Xvid, codec thing is also a farce. Quicktime files (preferably with h.264 compression) are the only high-quality, cross-platform, “just works” option (largely due to iTunes/iPod market penetration) and I think using anything else is just silly if you want normal people to be able to view your file. Maybe you could consider WMV 9, but outside of that you’re just asking to be ignored (and even then you’re ignoring all Mac and Linux users). Yes, even a Quicktime file pales in convenience comparison to YouTube, but it’s nowhere near the bleak AVI picture you paint.

Eventually YouTube will stop sucking and all will be well, but you have to assume that music videos will still exist in any recognizable form by then. It just may be that YouTube effectively scares away all the artists and eliminates all the money before this happens. Ask any therapist: “I know I’m getting hurt now, but I’ll stick with it because things will eventually get better” is a very common and very dangerous pattern of thinking.

And a video made with a cellphone is clever the first time somebody does it, sad the second time somebody does it, and just depressing from number three on. Let’s hope we never get to that point.

There is no definite answer. Places that make higher quality downloads as easy to obtain as possible help, but they are no YouTube replacement. Finding high quality files is way harder than it should be. If the labels would just throw the directors and music video nerds a few bones every now and then (”bones” being higher quality downloads in addition to the YouTube versions) it might be just enough to get everyone to stick around for YouTube 2.0. I think the idealistic YouTube that doesn’t quite exist WILL be worth it as there are many, many positives to that system, but right now it’s doing as much damage as construction.