Koreans have a history of using television for radio. They turn on the TV to listen to music.
Why K-Pop is taking over the world (NPR): In Korea pop music always comes with an image. … While our record labels were built on radio, their record labels were built on television.
(This point /via Jonathan Altman).
And then there was YouTube, where music doesn’t exist unless there is imagery attached.
But what about hypertext? Why should audio be extended with video instead of web pages?
Web pages are a superset of video. They can include video, but they can include other features as well, and these other features might be more applicable. For example lyrics in a video are great, but you can’t resize the font or do a web search.
In the past I have blogged about media players letting you provide a bundle of audio and HTML together, and treating the bundle almost like they would treat plain old MP3.
But maybe this is a misunderstanding of the value. Maybe what users want is not web, it’s media, and video is the thing they desire because it speaks in a sensual, emotive, expressive language.
The “videos” on YouTube are web pages. But they are very object-y, with the video player being the object people see, share, favorite, etc.
I think part of what makes media definable are the consistency of the media objects’ form. Records are one kind of media because one LP is so much like another in its shape, etc.
YouTube gives web videos that kind of object-y-ness, but those pages on YouTube really work as a media format for anything that fits in the player–from real movies to single images with audio tracks.
So, yeah, YouTube videos are maybe the new 45s more than mp3s have been.
Jay, are you thinking that in reality the new format is not video in isolation but YouTube pages as a whole?
You are an insightful dude, Jay.