So, YouTube. Man, did that come out of nowhere. As an internet phenomenon, it ranks right up there with Blogger and Napster. Metafilter is full of YouTube links now, and suddenly people are watching video in greater quantities than before. And perhaps the biggest sign of YouTube’s importance? In hindsight, YouTube’s development and popularity seems inevitable. When you consider how people watched internet video before—messing with codecs, upgrading Quicktime and Windows Media, loading their computers with spyware-infested codec packs, dealing with different forms of streaming and saving files to disk and the list goes on—it’s amazing that we put up with that for so long when we could’ve had neat little Flash applets to do the job instead. Not long ago I wouldn’t have trusted Flash to do video at all, having struggled to put together a proper UI for a class project involving Flash-encapsulated video. But here we are.

And now that people don’t have to think about how to upload video, or what codecs they need to play video, we’ve reached the point where people just watch video on the internet without a second thought. Case in point: both Pitchfork and Stylus put up their top 100 music videos list, an article that would’ve been woefully inadequate two years ago but makes perfect sense today, now that it’s easy to embed videos straight into the page. Yes, snarky commentary and the video in real-time—what a wonderful world we live in. But the real benefit for music videos isn’t that Pitchfork can now tear them apart with vigor; it’s that bands who would never have gotten coverage on MuchMusic or MTV can now be video stars as well.

Today’s example: the Pipettes, a trio from Britain backed by a mysterious four-piece band called the Cassettes.

The album is currently available only as an import, but it’s in the running as my favourite album of the year. And all because of a little video someone put on YouTube. (Which was promptly found by Pitchfork, I won’t lie.)