Music Video Codes

Music Video Codes is a service that provides free HTML codes of music videos to embed on websites, blogs, and community member’s profiles.

History
Key statistics
As of January 2006, Music Video Codes’ traffic on Media Metrix was reported at 1.99 million unique visitors for the month, while also once ranked as the number 6 trafficked music site destinations via Nielsen NetRatings above the likes of Napster, MTV Networks Music, Warner, Universal, and Sony. MusicVideoCodes.com is also a top 6,000 English website per Alexa .

Domain Name
On November 19, 2004 MusicVideoCodes.com was purchased by Jay Gould. Although the domain name is 15 letters in length, it has become one of the Internet’s most popular destinations due to its self describing name. In December of 2005, founder Jay Gould sold the domain name and website to New York media company Bolt Inc. for an undiscolsed amount.

MySpace Effect
The overnight success of MySpace.com (which was later acquired by News Corp for $580 million) was largely dependent upon the ability for MySpace members to customize their profile’s using CSS and HTML. Music Video Codes is perhaps the most widely used HTML tool among MySpace members. MySpace has been described as being built on personality and personalization, from customizing buttons, HTML, to copying and pasting videos into profiles. In a November article by Clickz Network, Zachary Rodgers unknowingly at the time described a Music Video Code without realizing it by stating: "They can even copy and paste the video right into their own profile using a simple HTML grab feature". In January of 2006 MySpace launched a video upload service to host and serve member videos, while providing an HTML embed tag for each video uploaded so that members can place their videos in their profiles or syndicate them onto other websites. This seems to demonstrate the amazing effect Music Video Codes have had on the MySpace audience over the past year.

Criticism and problems
Deep Linking
Music Video Codes originally where deep links to music videos on other websites. Deep linking is a practice in which an HTML embed tag points to a specific page or content (in this case the music video) within another website.

Legality
There are questions whether or not Music Video Codes are legal or not since the website is not hosting the material and is only making it available for others to view from its original content holders website through the means of deep linking. In November of 2005, Media Metrix ranked MySpace the 18th most visited website. As noted in the November 2005 article of USA Today, young high school seniors on MySpace are posting their favorite Music Videos, which is a clear indicator in itself of the popularity of Music Video Codes and the value the teens place on them. The music videos, which are copyrighted material, are not hosted by MySpace or Music Video Code sites, but rather by the labels or other sites. If the copyright holders or content providers do not wish to allow the copyrighted material to be deep linked, they could certainly prevent the content from being deep linked on their end, which raises whether or not they want the material to be deep linked as a Music Video Code.

Popularity
As Music Video Codes and MySpace grew in popularity throughout 2005, a large number of websites began to surface. The market share and traffic to the original Music Video Codes website, MusicVideoCodes.com, has been diluted greatly due to the ease of creating and copying the service, but the popularity for the service has only risen among its users. In January of 2006, there are over three million search results listing the term "Music Video Codes". In the month of December 2005, the term “Music Video Codes” was searched over 287,000 times via the Overture keyword selector tool. At its peak, the term was searched over 500,000 times in a given month, providing us an insight into one of the Internets great phenomenon.

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