Not much is left of the music video industry. Profi ts have fallen, budgets have been slashed and fewer videos are being made. Videos today can look like they're aping devices of the 80s, as if what we saw then wasn't refl ective of musical styles or a zeitgeist but rather economics. 1 While it has always been diffi cult to make a living directing music video, now even the top directors tend to say, "I'm going on vacation-I'm going to direct a music video" because they don't get paid for what they do. 2 I'm hopeful, however. Artists and technicians within other genres and media are laboring under similar constraints (The NY Times recently cut 10% of its staff and shut down foreign bureaus: yet within a year the company predicts an uptick). 3 Music video has always been mutable. I think it will survive this transition. Perhaps also, this moment presents an opportunity. If we listen carefully and attend patiently, we'll learn new things about the possibilities of the form. I've claimed that music video is strange and getting stranger (Vernallis 2004: p. 6). Perusing the internet produces unusual experiences: as we come across videos set adrift between election news clips, exhortations about how to keep your mate sexually engaged, and the newest fad diets; or click among streams of text, snapshots, and other YouTube links, music videos can now become the anchor rather than the source of discontinuity. Has the form of music video become the supertext? Music video's elongations and instances of condensation, its alternating thickets and wide-open spaces map onto the web's larger structures. Do the web's simultaneous windows and jumpy advertising also shape music video aesthetics? On a webpage, music videos compete with lurid pop-up ads and other scrolling devices. So why do the song and image project further than they ever did? The videos themselves still want to claim a liberatory otherness: "I kissed a girl and I liked it." 4 CAROL VERNALLIS 236 Does music video's true home now reside elsewhere-in the fi lm trailer, the mashup, the wedding video, the visual arts fl ash project, the DIY (do it yourself) aesthetic? Does this mean the genre has new means of realizing itself? We might fi rst ask what music video is today. Older defi nitions don't seem to work. In the 80s and 90s people knew what a music video was-a song set to memorable imagery, paid for by the record company to promote the song or musicians, and screened on cable. Now, however, with YouTube's cornucopia of clips, DIY aesthetics, and new digital cinema's musical segments, the boundaries have been blurred. In Auto-Tune the News, newscasters with their voices processed through Auto-Tune "sing" their stories accompanied by tracks built in Fruity Loops, an inexpensive music-production program. 5 While some elements suggest prior understanding of the music video, others don't, as the experience leans close to watching news footage with a musical twist. Music videos have always blended genres, incorporated other media, and adopted experimental techniques, but...