Flash, and the Slow Death of a Music Website

MTV stopped deserving its own name years ago. That part’s settled, barely worth mentioning. What I didn’t expect was for the website to make the television programming look restrained by comparison.

MTV.com used to be the fastest way to check what was actually charting in America—TRL, MTV2, whatever was moving that week. The site was cluttered, sure, but it functioned. What went live a few weeks back is something else: an enormous Flash construction that autoloads video ads before anything resolves, buttons that spin forever, and pages that may or may not actually exist. I genuinely can’t tell if some of these sections are broken or simply aspirational.

The defense I’d expect from Viacom is that broadband penetration in the US makes this kind of thing viable now. Maybe. But even the Polish MTV site isn’t exactly light on its feet, so this isn’t a regional infrastructure argument. It’s a philosophy problem—someone decided that more Flash means more credibility, more modernity, more something, when there are plenty of examples in international web design that demonstrate the opposite. Less moves faster. Faster works. I just want to know what’s in the American top ten. That shouldn’t require a loading screen and a prayer.