As a child of the '80s, I remember when MTV was just music videos 24 hours a day. We had veejays to love and the different "shows" were just ways to package genres of videos. Times were good and MTV spurred album sales as we discovered music we loved. But all that went away for a long time. But recently, MTV made a big deal about bringing back music videos. Sure it's on at like three and four in the morning, but that's what DVRs are for.

So I record AMTV and AMTV2 (MTV2 got into it as well) for a few weeks and it's even worse than my local pop station. Eminem's "We Made You" was played every single hour on the hour for four hour straight. It was almost as bad for Britney Spears' "If U Seek Amy" and "Poker Face" by Lady GaGa Okay, I get that. New videos and the like. But then they showed me something called a "Video Flashbacks" and I got excited. 30 years of videos to choose from, alright! How can this not be awesome? I can put up with new video repeats for glimpses of videos past!

Did you know that Michael Jackson's "Beat It" is the only video he made? How about Christina Aguilera? She made a video for "What a Girl Wants" and that's it. What the hell, MTV?! You have 30 years of music videos to choose from, literally hundreds and thousands of artists and songs and you pick one video from an artist and play that over and over again like it's a new video? Yes OK Go's "Here It Goes Again" was a clever video, but that doesn't mean I need to see it every day.

After a few days of this, my wife and I sat down with our recorded AMTV and AMTV2s and watched literally 18 hours worth of videos to see how bad it was. And by watched I meant we were fast-forwarding through them, because in that 18 hours between both networks, they aired three videos that we hadn't already seen from the couple of days before that. You were so close to doing something good for music fans around the world and you blew it.

I can't help but think the state of music videos on television has something to do with the decline in music sales in this country. Videos were our passive portal to what was new in music. Hell, even TRL did that when the rest of MTV abandoned the format to a certain extent, but now that's gone as well. I guess since you are the network that thinks we want to see everything you air about twenty times before we're done with it, I shouldn't be surprised. And I'm not.

But I'm very disappointed in you, MTV. Your name used to stand for something that meant the world to me and my generation. And AMTV could have brought us back, but it didn't. I guess I could tune in once every month or so to see if you've added anything new to your playlist. But that means I have to remember MTV as the place to go for music videos.