Free music videos can be obtained in a variety of ways. The easiest and most common way is through the popular video sharing website Youtube. There, millions of music videos reside, some illegally, others legally. The biggest problem with watching music videos on Youtube is the quality, or lack thereof. Many of the videos are grainy, low resolution, or the sound is just awful.
However, useable free and perfect quality free music videos are starting to appear legally on Youtube. Many major labels are accepting a few songs to be uploaded to Youtube in watchable quality. Many of them are even HD videos that go up to 1080p! While not all of an artist’s music videos will be uploaded on to Youtube, there will be enough to give you a sample of what their music is generally like.
Another great source of free music videos is MTV’s website. They have a fairly large selection of online music videos that can be streamed anytime. The quality of the video is excellent and the vastness of genres is amazing. They have legitimate music videos of classic rock music like Led Zeppelin and obviously more popular genres such as rap. Their website allows for fast downloads and minimal wait, in fact the only waiting you have to do is for commercials. There is a 15 second commercial at the beginning of each music video, which to me isn’t much to ask. The only downside to their website is that there appears to be no search function. You have to choose your artist from a list sorted by letters.
Another great website to search for free music videos is AOL’s video portion. They have an easy to use interface where you can stream the latest and greatest music artists or even browse the classic oldies videos like Aerosmith. While there’s an advertisement before each video, it is well worth it for the features that you get. Availible for each video is the artist’s biography, videos, pictures, tour dates, and lyrics. This makes it easier to find related videos from the band, or to gather general information about them or the song.
When searching for free music videos there are many choices at hand. In the end it comes down to audio and video quality and abundance of artists. Things like advertisements and a nice looking user interface come second to me. Out of all the music video websites I’ve shared, I would have to choose AOL as being the best. It has a large variety and gives a lot of useful information about the song and band being played. My search for free music videos has finally been set to rest with the finding of AOL’s excellent example of how music sharing should be done.