No, this isn’t an article from The Onion. Really, I promise!

I grew up watching MTV (and it’s Canadian counterpart, MuchMusic). It showed music videos 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from bands like Van Halen, Rush, Kraftwerk, The English Beat and all sorts of cool bands. Shows were hosted by cool VJ’s such as Marth Quinn.

As time passed the execs at MTV found that we had shorter attention spans and started just showing 3 minute clips of videos. They added music game shows & other music related shows. Finally, They dispensed with music concept altogether, and their programming became pop culture oriented instead of Music related.

MTV now brings us us wonderful and insightful programming like Paris Hilton’s My New BFF, MTV Cribs, True Life, and Sex, With Mom and Dad – but hold on. Someone at MTV had an amazing brainstorm – “what if we started a platform for music videos?”, “Dammit, that’s just crazy enough to work!”.

In the grandest irony of ironies, MTV has launched a new service very redundantly called MTVMusic.com (now redirects to MTVHive.com). It’s got music videos for most of the popular music being released lately, a searchable database and all sorts of top 10 lists. They even have a (you guessed it) a social network.

And yes, since you asked – all those Corey Hart, Twisted Sister (who could do without the Twister Sister Dee Snider Makeup Kit? ) and Culture Club videos are still there – although if you like 80’s music videos, you should probably check this out instead.

MTV hosting music videos – what will they think of next?