Anthem Music Videos bills itself as Pandora for music video.  Anthem creates music channels of your favorite artists — you tell Anthem your musical tastes and the software will make suggestions just like other music discovery services. The twist is that Anthem, instead of acting like a radio channel, is supposed to be your own personal MTV.

The artist suggestions, powered by Last.Fm, are pretty good. My search for Ani DiFranco brought up other girl rockers like Liz Phair and Lisa Loeb. My search for mainstream acts also turned up a sampling of artists in matching genres within a decent range and while still offering up some variety.

The main problem with Anthem is that unlike other programs for creating customized music channels there is no seamless transition from song to song. Anthem calls out to YouTube to supply the video one song at a time. So you create a channel in Anthem, transfer to YouTube to watch the video, and then go back to Anthem to choose another song.

The other issue with Anthem is that video is a bandwidth hog. So unlike Pandora or Last.fm where you may have acceptable playback over 3G or the Edge network, Anthem won’t work without a wifi connection.

I’m going to keep Anthem on my phone because I want to see what the future holds for this iPhone application. As a music discovery tool, the ability to watch videos makes Anthem a nice complement to apps like Pandora or Last.fm. But it needs the ability to offer a playlist of nonstop videos before I can really say that Anthem is “must have.” For now Anthem remains a remarkable idea that is just taking its first steps towards what could be greatness.

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category: Music, Music Discovery