I have some weird digital cable package whereby I don’t have any normal music channels (i.e. MTV* or Much) but I get some weirder ones including channel PCHM otherwise known as Punch Much.

If you haven’t had the luxury of watching this channel, it’s basically 24/7 all-request music vids (except it’s not because I’ve seen it play some random top 40 video instead of the highest percentage request). To request a song, you send an SMS with the code number of the song you want to request, which means you have an even smaller playlist than your average Clear Channel radio station.

Actually, it’s kind of funny at times because you have kids requesting the same song over and over kind of like how DJ Fresh Prince played Ashley’s song 20 times an hour in that one episode of Fresh Prince (I’ve seen Don’t Cha twice since starting this post…). The only thing stopping (not very well I might add) these kids from doing it constantly is that everything you want to do on Punch Much costs 75¢.

i think us older viewers quickly realize that this channel is a money sink for the viewers who actually participate. You can’t realistically get a song played with one vote, so there goes like $5 per video you want to see. Then you can chat over tv with your fellow viewers at 75¢ a pop (it’s jackpot time for Much when they start playing trivia…don’t kids know about Google??) and of course you’ll need to register your nickname using another message. And if that’s not enough, if you don’t want your conversation being read by the other 50 kids watching the channel, you can take it offline and send a private message for, you guessed it; 75¢.

I hope that the smart kids would be sending email messages or phone numbers on their first message, but I’m guessing that Much cleverly filters out email addresses and strings of numbers.

* Upon coming back from the States, I was surprised to find that MTV Canada disappeared (MTV2 is actually worth watching). So turns out the story is that CHUM Media (which owns Muchmusic et al) bought out Craig Media who coincidently also ran MTV Canada. What, no anti-competition laws regarding music video channels??

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: popculture, SMS, tv