It’s crazy how quickly and easily indie web media space can be threatened, as the new royalty rates for online music radio are currently reminding us.  That’s a bad situation but I’ve been thinking less about what can be taken away and more about what can be ruined by a flood of mass media.

I’ve mentioned my concerns about people like Mark Cuban proposing that mass media content producers flood YouTube with bogus product.  Yet those possibilities seem less threatening than the coming flood of legitimate products from major content producers.

For example, Universal Music Group now has over 500 videos on their YouTube channel, a combination of recent releases and older tracks.  I had previously subscribed to their channel when it was low volume but when they suddenly dumped hundreds of videos into the mix, obliterating the presence of all my other subscriptions, I cancelled UMG’s.

Though I did initially post a bunch of their videos on VidRap, I stopped once I realized that they were intentionally posting low quality videos and that I was also flooding my own site.  So that form of media dominance was fairly easy to control on my end and doesn’t represent true competition with indie media.

But MTV’s plan to "build thousands of websites worldwide" should be cause for some concern among independents:
The network, which already has 150 websites in 162 countries, plans to build literally thousands more, hoping to draw viewers by letting them watch, contribute and even re-edit its television shows…It aims to build websites related to every personality and aspect of its shows, hoping to catch viewers wherever they happen to be on the Internet and on mobile phones…It has created three virtual worlds —Laguna Beach for teenagers, Nicktropolis for children and Virtual Hills for young adults — and says more websites can help it go deeper to promote individual shows and personalities.

And that’s exactly the right move for MTV, away from the portal and towards a distributed presence with ever proliferating points of access.  Very smart and very threatening for indies who have not powerfully established themselves in a clear niche with a strongly distributed presence across the web.