feeling listless

Music I miss pop up video as well. Does anyone know if they ever actually released any of those pop-up video style film dvds. I heard 'The Breakfast Club' was going to get the treatment 'Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall also appeared together in John Hughes' Sixteen Candles' 'Emilio Estevez is the brother of Charlie Sheen who appeared in John Hughes' Ferris Bueller's Day Off' that sort of thing.

Over here we have 'VH-1' and 'VH-1 Classic'. Both tend to play wall to wall 'classic' videos, although 'VH-1' tends to theme them, so today we had 'Greatest Hits of the 90s' and 'Greatest Hits of the 00s'. Now and then they have day long documentaries such as 'Top 100 Men', 'Top 100 Women' or '100 Shocking Moments'. They sometimes show films like Grease or Flashdance, and have a logo in the corner of the screen advertising them for a week before (bit distracting).

You might like to know (if your not sick of them) that 'I Love....' is a format which was bought from the BBC. Their tie-in sites are here ... some have been originated online ... but they give a pretty good idea of UK culture ... our version of 'I Love 1977' was introduced by Carrie Fisher.

Music tv is quite diverse on Satellite tv over here. It's roughly split into four sections:

Mtv are still the market leader and run 'Mtv', 'Mtv Hits', 'MTV2' (Rock / Indie), 'MTV Base' (Drum &...), 'MTV Dance', 'VH-1', 'VH-1 Classic' and newbee 'The Music Factory' (which is basically an Mtv Hits clone created for a terrestrial digital service, Freeview, (see this article which I'm shamelessly including because I wrote it). 'Mtv' has an awful lot none music programmes, and 'The Osbournes' and 'Jackass' seem to be on all of the time.

EMAP used to be a magazine publisher but they branched out into music radio not too long ago and set about buying up a large number of commercial local radio. Now they've branched out into TV. Their prototype was 'The Box' (chart music) which was so popular they've turned some of their radio stations or magazines into stations. So there is Smash Hits! (chart music again), Kerrang! (rock), Q Music (anything and everything, a lot of mixes lately), Kiss (Dance, R&B) and Magic (old chart music). They're run on a video jukebox model (do you have these in the states?) were you select the video you want via the telephone, then wait two or so hours for it to appear.

Sky tv itself stole the head of Mtv UK to run three music channels the oddly titled 'Scuzz', 'Flaunt' and 'The Amp'. To be honest it's very difficult to tell them apart in genre terms, but their quite distinctive in that they tend to play videos from artists you've never heard of for songs that'll never chart. Utterly bizarre.

There rest are indies. In the non-interactive corner we have Chart Show TV is just like most of the other channels, while it's sister channel The Vault feels like 'Mtv' when Mike was in charge. 'Classic FM TV' based on an national commercial station which features music promos for Classical Music. There are a couple of pay channels 'Channel U' is mostly R&B and 'P-Rock' (you get the idea).

The trouble with so many channels is the playlists are very limited. Yesterday afternoon the same Christina Aguilera video was playing on three different channels simultaneously. The other criticism is that although happy to emblazen them with massive logos, hardly any context is provided. To be disinctive I'd have my channel offering information about the video or artist while it was playing -- not pop-up video, more in the style of those DVD text commentaries which are becoming quite common. TV music journalism is mostly dead.

Here is a handy list of all the Channels on UK satellite ... scroll down to see the music channels and links to their official websites.

[Originally posted here. Time travelled into the past from 12/09/2003 12:36am]