Can 4music Compete? [Updated]

Nate Elliott | June 15, 2007, 03:52 PM

Channel4 launched its free ad-supported online music video channel today, claiming 20,000 videos. It's a pretty nice site and experience. And Mark, our music expert, thinks they can compete.

I wish 4 luck. And I'm very much not our music expert. But I know this: I've been getting thousands of free music videos from music.yahoo.com and music.yahoo.co.uk for years now. And when I searched 4music for videos from U2, and Hard-Fi, and Arctic Monkeys, and Snow Patrol, they had none. (Not through the video search, and not from the artist pages.) Yahoo's got all of those. I think maybe 4 has some gaps to fill before they can really compete.

UPDATE: Mark swore he'd seen some Arctic Monkeys videos, so I went and spent another 5 minutes digging. Turns out they do have some of their videos there, but they're accessible from neither the main artist page nor the video search. Plus I couldn't get any of the videos to play anyway. If you're going to add an outsourced music service, and you're going to promote it with a "lots of free music videos" headline, don't you want to make sure the video works first?

SECOND UPDDATE: I spoke with Simon Gooch at MusicBrigade earlier today. MusicBrigade are the company powering 4music's video section, and he explained why I couldn't see any videos. I first logged into the site from Berlin, and got tagged with a German cookie. Because I had a German cookie and was visiting a UK site, and because MusicBrigade's relationships with the labels requires rights be handled differently in different countries, I wasn't allowed to see videos on 4music -- even once I found them. When I then flew to the UK the next day, I still had that German cookie -- and it still prevented me properly seeing the content. It's probably not a problem their core demographic would have, since their core demographic doesn't fly 4 times a week, like me.