Video Pool - Commercial Use Music Videos on VHS HiFi

Disclaimer: I am about to share something that I don't know much about and the internet largely seems d'void of information regarding it... looking for knowledge and experience from fellow music enthusiasts.

Okay, so this post begins with a story of course. One day several years back, I was down at Repo Record in Charlotte pokin' around for cool stuff. I think it was on a Sunday afternoon over the summer and I was hoping to score some ambient electronic stuff from their bargain bins. Anyways, Repo Record is not one of those swanky 'vinyls' shops for the swifties and hipsters (where the records are all in glass cases and on high shelves with collector sleeves and high prices). Rather, it's a good ol' rock and pop store that has crates upon crates full of the classics. I'm talking 80s rock and pop, 70s soul, and 90s alt... all pretty well cared for and affordable. Now the owner of this shop has been in the business for years, probably since the early 80s, and he keeps pretty much everything cool he has gotten over the years (He even archived all of the store newspaper ads ever run). So, the entire store is littered with awesome collectables, standees, posters, and some autographed items as well. It really is a smaller store that is packed to the brim with anything and everything music business related, so you really have to go many times to see it all. (No this is not a clever ad for Repo haha)

Anyways, On this occasion I was down at the store, looking around behind crates and cabinets, and I saw out of the corner of my eye a black VHS clamshell case. I thought to myself, 'Why would they sell VHS movies here of all places?' So, I went over to where I had spied this VHS case and ended up finding a lot more of them! (about 40 or so). They all had titles on them like 'Top 40 Week 126 - 1987', 'HitVision #21', and 'Core Music Service'. Anyways, when I picked up a few of the tapes and looked at the labels, I became astonished as I read off hit after hit after hit from the likes of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Genesis, Mr. Mister, Janet Jackson, Paula Abdul, Chicago, Bryan Adams, Aerosmith, and more. So, being that the owner happened to be there that day, I took a few of the tapes up to the front desk and asked him what they were for. Essentially, He said that they were all full of Music Videos of singles popular in the top 40 and that he used to subscribe to these mail order services that gave tapes to him by the month so he could have the latest music videos playing on loop in the store.

Now when I heard this I was amazed and the collector in me was jumping for joy inside! Up until this point, I had no idea there was a way to collect proper legal physical media of original music videos or music on VHS. It was all new to me, so I bought pretty much all of em he had on hand over the next couple of visits. Ended up with about 30 tapes from this store.

After doing some research on the subject, I learned that this format of VHS tape is called ‘Video Pool’, and it was essentially a cottage industry that started up in the mid 80s after the music video craze got big. Basically, there were a lot of these companies that sprung up at once, all offering licensed music for public and commercial use as a subscription service. All of the legal licensing issues that surrounded ordinary home use music was solved by these companies, and each group focused on a different use case. Some tapes were for retail use, some for DJs, some for public spaces (like bowling alleys and clubs), and some for record and music shops.

So, what I am going to do is share every 'variant' of video pool tape I have in the collection, and also sort of introduce them to the web to hopefully get more exposure for them.

Variant 1: 'Telegenics"



Telegenics is one of the more common publishers I have in my library. Releases from this publisher occasionally come up for sale online, and searching for Telegenics on Google will get you a few different types of promo music related videos and merch plus some company history. There are about 15 videos on a single tape, and there isn't much branding on the program aside from the short intro screen shown above. The music videos on this tape are exactly the same as the MTV public release videos except for a 'Telegenics" logo that appears at the end of each video along with the usual artist/song/record label lower thirds. The videos are uncut and not shortened for TV which you might find with some MTV videos. Each song is also offered in HiFi, and preserves the outro style of the original reels (cut or fade).



These tapes sound really great, and with headphones, they have a rich analog sound that is detailed and energetic. My collection of Telegenics releases covers pop and adult contemporary from about 1987-1990. I really love how they look on the shelf, with each tape having a different colored coverart, it stands out beautifully.



Telegenics also offered these 'Lounge-O-Matic' products on 120min tapes that had much more music on them and also a more diverse selection. I have a few of these, same as before, just more content!




Variant 2: 'Video Pool by Sight&Sound Entertainment'



Now we get into the more obscure stuff! These Sight&Sound tapes are the same idea as the Telegenics releases above, but they are from a different publisher. 15 songs, same uncut music videos, and with HiFi sound. Unlike with Telegenics, I could not locate any information whatsoever on Sight&Sound Entertainment OR these tapes themselves. It seems no one online has taken photos or written anything on them. I also could not find any sold online listings for them. As for the releases themselves, the artwork on each tape has had more effort put in, and the cassette labels are also more professional looking. Another major difference here is that the labeling on these specifically state that they are not for home use... guess I broke that rule! Even though the labeling is nicer than the Telegenics releases, the quality of the tapes are not; Unbranded tapes were used for these releases that had poorer quality shells. Not a deal-breaker.





Something else apparent when you play these tapes is the branding. There is a more sophisticated animated logo sequence that shows before the first song begins, and also there is this cool 3D panning countdown that plays before each video. I do think the countdowns are cool and all, but if you are playing this in a retail setting it may not present as well as simply one video going directly into the other. Sound quality is about the same as the Telegenics, although they seem a tad louder to me. I have about 10 of these Sight&Sound tapes covering 1989-1991.




Variant 3: Vision Management Group



Out of all of the different publishers I have found so far, I think these Vision Management Group tapes are my favorite. First of all, they seem much more homemade than the other variants. The labels are just blank stationary looking templates, and the track names are either typed on with a typewriter, or a dot matrix printer was used. Furthermore, it seems like they just used a glue stick to hold the labels to the case. I am glad they at least put a label on both the outside and inside of each clamshell, as the outer labels come off really easily. It really looks like Vision Management Group didn't have quite as much of a budget to work with on these as maybe Telegenics had. Another reason these are my favorite is because of the quality of the tape used; Every release I have from this publisher uses SuperHG tapes and sound incredible and the shell protects the tape much better than the cheaper tapes used by some of the other brands. Finally, these tapes have some of the more heavy hitting favs of mine on them. (I mean c'mon, Bad is the first track on one, and the other I am showing has some Fleetwood Mac, U2, and Heart)



Not much to see here with the branding in-program. I must say though that the faux neon looking logo shown above looks very to its time and cool to see. Just as before, 12-15 songs per tape, all of the same videos you find on TV, with HiFi sound. I have several of these, from 1986-1988.

So, in concluding this first post, I definitely learned about something really cool and unique I had no idea existed before. Who knew a retailer or record shop could just obtain officially licensed music videos from a distributor, and in glorious HiFi VHS sound no less! For me, I kinda feel like I got my own little retro MTV experience right at home... kinda nice!

Curious who else has some of these and what your experiences are with them.

I do have 3 more variants to share, but I'll do that soon.

 

Allowing commercial use is unusual and the tapes themselves look as if they were produced in very low quantities.

However, here in the U.K. I would be more surprised by finding 8 tracks (which were never particularly popular here) than commercial VHS tapes of 80s music videos.

The "Now" series of compilation albums were launched in 1983. The first eighteen were also available on VHS for both sound and vision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Now_That's_What_I_Call_Music!_discography. As shown in the disography they are still being released on CD with Now 120 being the latest.

The VHS tapes are very easy to find on eBay. Here is Now 1 starting with Phil Collins https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/257355920230



If you were interested in one particular artist there was probably a VHS tape for you. Having fallen in lust with Madonna I bought this four video tape


back when "The First Album" didn't have a name and before "Like a Virgin" was released.



Another big seller back in the early 1980s was this


I don't know if there was any breaking of the "commercial use" rules or if they even existed back in 1983, but first time I saw the Thriller Video I was in a large club, which like many back then had a projection TV on a balcony above the dancefloor (and numerous lasers of course). It was difficult to decide whether to dance to the music or gawp at the screen.

Since you mention MTV

Around this time most people in the U.K. could only receive four TV channels, Not surprisingly video recorders were selling like hot cakes.
To quote Wikipedia
"The 1980s marked the explosion of the VCR market in the UK, transforming from an expensive luxury item into a household staple, with ownership increasing from around 10% in 1982 to well over half of British homes by the end of the decade."

Since Video was such a trend most U.K. bands would spend lots of money on a fancy video to go with it. That led to "The Second British Invasion" as MTV found there were more videos available from British bands than American ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_British_Invasion

To sum things up this is literally where MTV began (and ended)


Available on numerous VHS tapes including this one from Canada
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/306650293176

 

Nothin’ wrong with a little Madonna! I do love a lot of her tracks. Not so much her early 90s erotica phase, but both her 80s and Ray of Light eras are sublime to me.

Yeah, over here in the eastern US it’s kinda the exact opposite. You can basically trip over 8tracks at thrift stores and record shops if you aren’t careful, and the amount and variation of content on them I’m sure would be quite rare for other markets. Some of my local shops don’t take them anymore as they just sit for years, and nobody buys ‘em. To be fair, they don’t sound particularly great (even at their very best), and the nostalgia market never did seem to swing by to give them much love (compared to the revivals of records and cassettes).

See, this is really interesting to me on a few levels. I have heard of the Now series, it’s been a staple on CD in US stores for as long as I’ve been aware of collecting music, but I had no idea they were putting out music video compilations on tape early on. From that listing you linked, this looks to be a full retail product made for home and personal use. Also, the early tapes in 1983 and 1984 would have been produced before VHS HiFi arrived, so I can’t imagine they sounded all that great. Still, very cool and something I’d consider picking up if they weren’t PAL and had to be imported.

I wonder if we ever had something like the Now series VHS tapes here in the states? Aside from some label specific limited releases, I’m not thinking we did…. closest I could find was the MusicVision tapes popular for a few years in the mid 80s:

https://ebay.us/m/wzFRxe



These are all US release compilations similar to Video Pool tapes, but they are regular retail and most always focus on one artist or group at a time. A great plus with these, they are all boasting HiFi sound. Another interesting thing here, I noticed the PMV (PolyGram Music Video) branding on a lot of these, and I also found that same branding on the later Now VHS releases.

Ahh yes, I’ve seen this release! I don’t personally own it, but I do have this:



This is an another Video Pool series from a Canadian publisher that I just got in from eBay. I’m making a follow up to my first post about this publisher soon, but it’s relevant here because it actually does include the full length short film of Michel Jackson’s Thriller, and it looks and plays pretty darn well. I love the disclaimer on the back… that’s an interesting piece of music history and very contextual to the time period.

Based on some personal digging, it seems the UK didn’t enact a strict law against showing copyrighted material in public until 1988, so it may have been a grey area. I believe the US had something earlier than that (at least for movies). Just for the record to explain the issue, basically if you buy anything that has copyrighted material on it, you can watch it or display it privately only, and cannot show it or use it in a public way whatsoever without PPR (public performance rights) or permission from the owner(s). Music Pool was essentially a legal way to fix this; Music Pool services operated as an exchange service for both the record labels and for commercial customers. Essentially, Record labels would license out their song catalog for commercial use in exchange for feedback on how the songs were performing and which songs were received the best by listeners and customers. The Music Pool services would get this information from DJs or business who paid to use the music, and the label could tweak their next releases based on the feedback. Pretty cool system, and there’s much more on it here at the Wikipedia page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_pool?wprov=sfti1#

The name ‘Video Pool’ is derived from ‘Music Pool’, and I would assume it operates the same way, except with video added and the release media being video tape rather than records or discs. FYI, there are still some traditional Music Pool services in operation.

 

Yes. These were a retail product sold and advertised alongside the audio only formats as shown by this advert


The companies behind now were EMI and Virgin who were two of the largest music companies in the U.K. back then. The series started after Virgin founder Richard Branson got fed up of licencing music for compilation albums to K'Tel and Ronco and decided they could produce compilation albums in house.

While trying to find out when they started releasing VHS HiFi I found this post.

https://apopfansdream.wordpress.com/words/now-vhs-special/

That shows a VHS HiFi release of Now 1. However I suspect that was a re-release from later in the 1980s.
Fun to see the Japanese Laserdisc versions further down the page.
The same post reminded me that the "Now" Video releases often had some different or extra tracks. I suppose some songs didn't have a video at the time of release, or if the song was associated with a film there might have been copyright issues.

Away from "Now" but still on the subject of VHS Videos, in 1985 (after the cinematic release of the film "Electric Dreams" which both I and my sister enjoyed ) she gave me as a present a commercial twin pack containing a VHS tape of the Film and an Audio Cassette of the soundtrack.

I'm sure the limited sound quality of most peoples VCRs did put some people off. In terms of a timeline I paid £340 for my first VCR (a basic mono one) in 1984. When I bought my first house in 1986 I was surprised that the people I was buying from had a £600 Panasonic HiFi. The equivalent of £1800 adjusted for inflation. Although I kept looking at them in shops, with other things to buy (including a CD player) in would be six years before I bought the first one I saw priced at under £300. The TV I had by then did have decent stereo speakers so i finally got to hear the HiFi soundtrack of the many VHS music videos I had accumulated by then.

 

You bring up a great point, and getting back to the retail Thriller tape you showed in a previous post, I have seen some of those on eBay with a Stereo marking on the front, and some with Dolby and HiFi markings on them as well. There not be many actual differences in this case, but I think it’s totally fair to assume that a good number of popular releases launched before HiFi came out (that were still selling well) got a revised release that had HiFi audio tracks. Interestingly, one or two of my oldest compilation tapes have HiFi tracks recorded onto the tape, but some of the videos themselves are in mono… so I’m hearing the slight VHS background fuzz in between songs in stereo, but the music in mono. Plus, as the tape plays through, you may hear one video in glorious Stereo HiFi, and then the next in bad ol’ mono. Again, not a widespread problem for me as I’ve seen it on only 2 of my tapes.

As a technical side note, I must say that I’ve found HiFi audio to be a bit unreliable with many of my newer VHS machines. I have an old JVC made Zenith flagship player from ‘87 with lil’ VU lights that will reliably play HiFi out of any tape I throw at it (proper movies or MVs) with essentially no dropouts, but some of my later VCRs have occasional audio crackling, more frequent dropouts, or just failure to read the HiFi track at all. In my experience, this has been mostly because of auto-tracking. My Zenith doesn’t have auto tracking, so I just manually tweak the tracking and it stays locked on the HiFi track the entire time. Dropouts will only occur if the tape itself has a bad spot. On the other hand, I have some late 90s consumer Panasonic and Sharp players that can get spooked in the middle of playback and adjust the tracking too far thus loosing the HiFi signal for a few seconds. Of course a dirty head will make it worse, but my experience with reliable HiFi has been truly noteworthy with only a few of the oldest machines I have. (This is my own experience of course, maybe others would have much better luck)

Here’s the aforementioned Zenith. I’m currently running it into a headphone amp and just listening/watching with headphones.

That’s an interesting timeline. I could definitely see how CD was a very real distraction for a lot of people who might have been otherwise inclined to buy into VHS HiFi earlier. I honestly didn’t know much about any of this until recently, and I’m certainly learning a lot here. I was born in the late 90s, so when I was coming up, we had a lot of VHS tapes that I would watch at home and also take on road trips, but it was all at the end of the format’s life. For home, we had 2 identical el cheapo Magnavox silver faced plastic VCR, and for trips, My Mom had a 2001 Nissan Quest minivan that had a built in VHS player and a tiny little flip down LCD monitor. In both cases, there was never an opportunity to be wowed by picture quality or audio haha, but we had like 4 DVDs at this time, so VHS was the way. I got a portable DVD player and some Disney classics on DVD around 2007, so that was kinda the official family switch to DVD.

 

VHS HiFi is annoying when it suffers from drop outs, but when it is working properly is close to CD quality.

Did you notice how as well as being marked HiFi some of the tapes were marked Stereo with a Dolby symbol.
That is because prior to the introduction of VHS HiFi some top of the range VCRs had stereo linear audio tracks and Dolby to tray and keep the hiss down.
At about 2/3rd the tape speed of Compact Cassette they wouldn't match the quality of Compact Cassette but they were trying.
This rebadged JVC is an example. Aimed at the type of person who would walk in a shop and ask "what is the best VCR on the market", the price and weight matched that criteria.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/277757171564

In the late 1980s you had to be careful as some low tier brands like Matsui were still selling Stereo VCRs only capable of recording and playing back linear sound. On a different forum someone commented it was surprising how tapes continued to have the linear stereo soundtrack years after the last VCRs equipped to play in stereo were made. I guess if the duplicating houses had the facility they just continued using it.

Back to music videos Europe got DVD a bit later than the USA as it took a while to agree on the surround sound standard. Consequently there were (to me) some surprisingly late releases only available on VHS.

Three which I sought out and bought myself were.

• The early Spice Girls videos. Yes you can probably find all the tacks on Youtube but many tapes have interviews and chat between them.
• Cathy Dennis. For a long this had copyright problems on Youtube. Someone ended up posting it with video reversed making me more curious. The only way to see it properly was to buy the VHS tape.
• The KLF. More extreme than above, when The KLF "Left the Music Business" they blocked their entire back catalogue. Of course they couldn't block sales of second hand media. Five years ago they finally released their videos on Youtube. I reckon the quality on Youtube is at least twice that on the official VHS tape which was a bit of a fuzzy mess.

I Still love the excesses of this video though.

As a bonus you can see another early 1990s KLF track with the latest gadget, a mobile Phone.


p,s, Of course the pre DVD alternative to VHS was Laserdisc. However I own just one of those (bought to frame one day) and have nothing to play it on.

 

It's been a few weeks since I visited this thread, but I have definitely been doing a lot with these tapes. I have tested all of the ones I currently have in my collection, and I don't have any tapes with major damage, and only one or two HiFi drop outs total! Not as bad as I was expecting to be honest considering they all come from very different environments and walks of life. I did initially have about 4 tapes in the 'Sight&Sound' series that were all made by Memorex and had severe sticky shed syndrome... but those were thrown out before I even started this project.

Anyways, I have more interesting publishers to share.

Variant 4: 'RPI Video Pool'



Apparently, RPI Video Pool was Canada's number one video pool service (according to them) and started up around 1983-1984. Although this was a much smaller operation when compared to the likes of Telegenics, it is noteworthy because the owner, Paul Murton, documented his adventures buying and maintaining the service in this article, and also had this to say about his company:

"RPI had the public performance rights for all songs Canada-wide, directly licensed by the owners of the music. Gone were the legal issues of getting popular music into bars, because we not only had the right to play the videos, but the right to copy them."

He had this to say about the demand for Music Videos in public places:

"It came as no surprise that our services were in high demand among countless DJ/VJ video roadshows and large dance clubs. My focus, however, was on making continuous video sets like I did with the big hits for Sound Power. Two hour VJ sets on VHS went out to A&W restaurants, who were delighted to show music videos for customers to enjoy while they waited happily for their Teen Burgers. From 1983 to 2000, Lois Logie, Bruce Richardson, Mike McGuire, Daniel Lachapelle, Eric Ayache and Eugene Francois helped my business at 39 Elmer in the Beaches the most successful it has ever been. I was even able to buy a house in the neighborhood for $200,000"

I love how this article highlights the cottage industry Music Video culture had created amidst the combination of the early days of home video. Everyone wanted a piece of the MTV magic in their restaurant or club, and all of these small video pool services were more than happy to help (and become wealthy in the process of course). RPI Video ended in 2000, which sounds about right given that VHS was on its way out, and the music video business was hitting upon rocky ground by this point.

In the case of my RPI tapes, I did import them from Canada to the US, and they all sound excellent! Really clear sound with just a touch of bass boost to the audio track to add some extra pump to the songs. All of my RPI tapes range from 1986-1988, and most are compilations that have songs from 1982-1988 as they aren't 'top 40 current weeks' or 'hot tracks of the year' collections like some of my other publishers' variants are. I have 10 of these, all play with the same quality and intro bumper.




Variant 5: 'Wavelength Video'



Back in the USA for this release, more specifically, Wavelength Video comes out of West Hollywood right on Sunset Blvd. I can't find any information about this publisher online, but these seem to be the most homemade and barebones releases I've seen yet, or maybe they are tied with Vision Management Group for that honor. I will say however that they have a really high quality and ordinate animated intro that is very 80s and I might add is on-par with some of the old MTV bumpers I've seen. Although I see Wavelength Video as the brand of these, there are many other names listed on these tapes. On the first info bumper, you can see 'VIDEO ROCK Unlimited Inc.' as the publisher, and some of the tapes have 'MASTER DIGITAL Inc.' written on them. All of these companies come from different areas around Burbank, Hollywood, and Santa Monica... so either one company is changing its name and moving a lot, or more likely these tapes are part of a joint venture of some sort.

I think these are my favorite. I just love the unique cases that are extremely sturdy, and the branding on the program itself. The 6 releases I have of these range from 1984 (the early days of VHS HiFi) to 1987, and have some of the most iconic music videos of the early to mid 80s on them. They sound great as you would expect, but definitely more flat than the RPI or Telegenics tapes that I have. The tapes Are also all Japanese made and feature a brown edge flap on the tape.



Also interesting to note is that the lower thirds on these tapes which appear at the end of each song do not feature any publisher branding other than the record label responsible for the MV itself.





Variant 6: 'Retail Vision'



Now for my least favorite publisher of the bunch. From my research, it seems RetailVision was a very popular publisher of all kinds of promo materials in the 90s and 2000s, but these 'Genre X Vision' tapes were among the most popular stuff they had. HitVision, AlternaVision, PopVision... these were all lines of tapes they started selling in 1993. They are not rare at all like the other releases I've shown, and eBay is littered with them. I only have one of these tapes and I genuinely don't like it at all... it has a really cheap feel to it. First of all, the tape itself is very cheap and the sound quality is poor (despite being in HiFi). My copy of HitVision 56 from 2002 wasn't played much but the audio is generally muffled and lacking dynamic range. Next, the packaging is very scarce and has too much going on the front. Maybe I could forgive all of these problems if the music videos didn't have permanent watermarks in them that occluded about a third of the screen and commercials for other RetailVision products at the end of the tape. These tapes are in no way on the same level of the others, and if you want to collect the authentic music videos as the labels intended them to be seen and heard, please avoid these.

 

These are very cool looking, and a neat aspect of pop music history! Did you buy any to explore? I would have totally taken a few to try. Are these LPs or reels? The outer boxes on these seem record jacket shaped, but they are a bit deep for just one LP. I have a few radio reels from the 80s out of a local radio station, but nothing to play them with.

This is honestly why I have enjoyed collecting and watching these tapes so much, the quality on them is so much better than what you find on YT (except for the most famous MVs that got remastered properly to 4K). The camera or film equipment isn't the issue, it's the digitization and mastering of the YT uploads. Most YT music videos put up by the record labels were done over 15 years ago before HD was the standard for YouTube, so 480p or 720 is the highest you can get. For rarer MVs that the labels haven't put up (like this one), the quality is even less. (Shame because Best of Times is a fantastic Peter Cetera track, and I discovered it thanks to my tape library.) Now, you are starting to see remasters from some record labels' YouTube accounts, but sadly, only a small fraction are re-digitized from the original masters, while most use an AI upscaler to make it appear sharper and higher-res.

In contrast, these VHS tapes were made from clean duplicates of the master reels, so the only quality loss is from the reel to the VHS, and for the audio, it's not much loss at all. I was shocked when I started looking at videos I am well familiar with on these tapes. I gathered these insights:

1. Most of the music videos I have on tape are in 60fps and run at greater than 60hz. This makes them dramatically smoother than their YouTube counterparts, where 20-30fps is all I'm getting. (Sledgehammer, Invisible Touch, Ironic, Dude Looks Like A Lady), these were videos I made direct comparisons with and they felt so much different on tape than YT. It's true that you get more video noise on VHS than the YT counterparts, but the resolution is so low on the digital copies, it's worth it.

2. Audio in most cases is much much better on the VHS tapes than YT. First of all, the frequency response with VHS HiFi is on-par with CD, so the quality and range of these tapes are excellent. On YouTube, you are getting compressed audio, sometimes as bad as 128kbps (according to my YouTube downloader/analyzer tools). With the proper early model VHS HiFi player, and headphones, you would think you hearing a CD if it weren't for the minor VHS hiss (which is the trade-off). (Also, just don't use one of those newer auto-tracking plasticky VCRs, and HiFi dropouts will be largely dealt with.)

3. The music videos on YT usually feature the ordinary CD/radio release audio reels dubbed over the videos. This was a huge discovery for me. I'll give you an example. On this track 'You Oughta Know', the beginning only features vocals and percussion. BUT, my advance promo copy straight from WB Records features a strong base line mixed in at the beginning and different sounding drums on the first verse! I have many other examples of this too.

This is my copy of WB Records' in-store video pool demo reel that has the song I am referring to:



I think in summary, I've discovered that most of the Music Videos on YT are pretty cup up and butchered... low quality video, dubbed in studio tracks, weird edits to the total runtimes, and lower frame-rate. I think the amount of people collecting music videos on tape is quite low (compared to ordinary tapeheads and 'vinyls' people), so it's not a area that has been researched much. The difficulty and variation of prices/search keywords on eBay proves it is indeed a very off-beat thing. My library is growing, and it's becoming my favorite way to listen to music.

Very nice! Saw some of these online in my travels... I'd love to see photos and details of how it sounds.