Finnish music video TV program that has already gained a lot of kinds of reputation.

After Jyrki production was ended after many many years in MTV3 and SubTV, they needed to start a new program devoted to music videos. Thus was born Bänd-X.

The name refers to "Band Stock Exchange". The program is centered on "buying" of "stocks" of the bands in the program's web page (http://bandx.mtv3.fi/). In other words, users get to vote very directly which bands (not music videos!) get into the program - they dropped Jyrki's stupid voting system, which was good. They also show a video from a band that got least votes.

This was not remarkable, however. Bänd-X's voting page is quite simple: It just checks that only one IP address gets to buy 100 "stocks" every week. (Some say it doesn't actually check the IP - just sets a cookie.) No registeration is necessary. As a result, vote flooding is easy.

Originally in February 2002, people in Pelit magazine web message boards and Usenet decided to experiment with this: They vote-flooded Eels, a band that obviously never gets shown on Finnish TV, just to give a wake-up slap on the collective noses of the Jyrki generation. Naturally, MTV3 wasn't too happy about this and ignored Eels votes, now saying it's "cheat proof" (even though it isn't, just the same system!). Suburban Tribe's manager tried in Usenet, extremely thinly veiledly (or, as some would say, incompetently) ask people to vote for the band. Some E-mail spam masquerading as fundamentalist Christian evangelism tried to get people to vote for P.O.D. (I'm not making this up! =)...

Can't Alma Media do anything right?


Update: As of May/April 2002, they fixed the page and now require a free registeration... but this probably won't change things.

My sister also reported one worrying trend: "Linkin Park was #1 this week again, so let's see their video!" ... "This week, Linkin Park dropped to #2, but let's see their video anyway!" =)