Major Labels Launch Yet Another Anti-YouTube Offensive

noah | April 16, 2008 12:30 pm
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The music-video site PluggedIn launched today with about 10,000 videos from Universal Music Group, Sony BMG, and EMI. Branded with the tagline “Filter the noise. Hear the music,” PluggedIn is being seen by the major labels as an opportunity to once again dictate how their content should be experienced and used by the masses, bringing things back to the way they were before those pesky indie labels and YouTube remixers ruined their expense accounts and fat-cat lifestyles. Its picture quality is really quite nice, but it doesn’t allow embedding of its videos, and as mentioned, it only has about 10,000 clips in its label-generated database right now–although it’s licensed the All Music Guide’s content in an effort to make its content well look a lot deeper than it actually is. And not only that, it kicks those pesky people who have opinions about music that may be different than yours–and the ability to spell–to the curb, too!

No music editors here – the Vibe is simply a place where music fans collectively determine the value of the content. We display the best stuff as determined by the browsing activity of our users — what they watch, save, rate, and more. If something catches fire, it’s displayed on the Vibe page for the community to see.

Ah, a world without music editors. What a paradise, right guys? Anyway, so far the site’s most popular videos are U2’s “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” and Afroman’s “Because I Got High,” with the U2 video being the only one that’s broken the thousand-plays mark so far. Apparently there are more features on the way, although the fact that said features were previewed on the site’s official blog with a Jerry Garcia quote makes me wonder just how forward-thinking they could possibly be.

PluggedIn [Official site] Music-Video Pros Challenge YouTube [WSJ]