The Video Age

don’t mind either way but expecing a win for ‘no’

maybe as an admin you could embed the video in comments, if it’s noteworthy in some way and not one of the more famous #1s?

One problem at present of course is that Youtube is blocking all “official” copies of music videos for anyone in the UK, due to a rights dispute with the record companies. It has been dragging on interminably for ages now.

Tom, thanks for the half-60s list. Since I’m introducing myself, I’ll take this moment to gush: I love the blog, and you have to be the best music writer I have yet encountered anywhere. In all seriousness, your writing is gorgeous.

I voted yes, but think that Peter makes a good argument at 5. In voting for official videos, I’m taking that to mean promo videos and/or TOTP/Ready Steady Go/Beat Club/Midnight Special etc performances from the time, as opposed to someone using the tune as a soundtrack to them varnishing the garden bench.

I voted yes to official videos only just because they became so important in the Adam Ant/Duran Duran era and are worthy of comment themselves. Though I guess that would distract from the main point of Popular, the actual records.

I’d much rather videos be in the comments than the post itself – i sort of think it inelegant to have a youtube embed up there? Somehow I don’t feel that there’s space to have both sleevepic and video in the main post (and therefore in the stuff that appears on the lj rss feed, which reproduces entire posts).

(and if you must have videos in the original post will it always be behind a cut? on a bad day multiple youtube embeds on a page will make my browser fall over.)

I would say linking rather than embedding is a good idea, yes. Remember also that a lot of the links/embeds are going to end up broken after not much time at all – only “official” music videos tend to remain on youube resiliently, and most of those are blocked in the UK.

Pardon me for getting a little confused. I voted yes (for a link), but don’t think the video should be considered as part of the ‘package’ (so I should probably have voted no). I appreciate that the videos were significant to people’s memories on a lot of entries from this point on, but as others have said, Popular’s about the record. We could also take picture sleeves into account with everything from 1978 onwards, but I wouldn’t want to do that either.

My vote would be for linking – preferably to an official vid, but I’d say a good performance clip is the second choice, and the music with no vid would be last.

Definitely no to embeds for reasons of speed and efficiency. A link would be pretty nice, though I can see Peter’s point – and tbh if someone really wants to hear the song or watch the video it’s not beyond them to, you know, go to Youtube themselves. If they’re too lazy to do that then they probably don’t care all that much!

If its embeds vs nothing, I vote for nothing. I have a pretty decent memory/browser situation and even then too many embeds will make it a bit creaky.

I voted ‘don’t care’ – but would prefer links rather than embeds. Although we’ve reached the video age they were still not as ubiquitous then as they have become now. MTV was just a rumour in the UK and the audio part of the package was the dominant experience. Alternatively a memorable performance on TOTP or the Tube might hold a stronger memory than the official video (cf Nirvana and Come as you are). Lastly as one of the pleasures of this site is to share other peoples readings of the songs it might appear to give primacy to the video.

BitTorrent + page with lots of embeds = browser crash, for me, usually, so I’m glad that’s not going to happen.

Anyway, I voted no because I don’t like to lose the purity of, y’know, words about a record. Embeds in music-related “online content” are a pet hate of mine, (but even links are pushing it), because aside from the technical issues, a.) they stop you feeling involved (more fun to seek it out yourself via YouTube or whoever), b.) they tend to be counterproductive, as you invariably start playing the clip while you’re still trying to read the piece, and end up concentrating on neither, and c.) they make the writing seem like blurb, deny it the right to its own little bit of space (I’m a bore about that sort of thing). Bad idea all round, unless you’re writing about something like this, where not supplying the link would be ludicrous: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfTT6xOcbdo

Anyway, pointless even mentioning this, as it’s all been decided. Good luck with forthcoming event, lack of sleep, etc, Tom.

Ooh, it would be nice to see just the Chart Show edits of songs too (with the fast forward bits). Now there’s nostalgia talking.