When MTV started replacing music videos with reality shows in the mid-Nineties, the genre slowly dried up -- only the biggest stars made videos, and only the biggest record labels could afford to produce them. Today, videos are everywhere: selling for $1.99 on the iTunes Music Store; posted for MySpace.com's 36 million users; streaming on Yahoo, AOL and MTV's new Overdrive online channel; available on demand via cable; and, soon, downloadable to cell phones. "Before, it was like, 'Well, MTV isn't showing this,'" says Eddy Cue, Apple's vice president of iTunes. "'Why make a video?'"

With more outlets than ever playing videos, musicians have plunged back into the form. My Chemical Romance posted "I'm Not OK" on MySpace.com before it broke on MTV. Chicago power-pop band OK Go's frenetic clip for "A Million Ways," which cost twenty-five dollars to make, has tallied 1 million online views and was recently added to the new college channel MTVU. And for their next single, Fall Out Boy plan to release two videos, one glossy and one gritty. "You're always making videos for MTV, but you're no longer making them only for that -- you're making them for Yahoo or AOL," bassist Pete Wentz says. "MTV is where you're reaching your biggest audience. But it's always cool to reach an audience that's under the radar."

For the first time since MTV went on the air in 1981, videos are no longer free promotional tools for CDs -- they're the product. Twenty days after iTunes made music videos and television shows available on October 12th, Apple had sold 1 million downloads (top sellers included the Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps" and Kanye West's "Gold Digger"). "[iTunes] is hopefully going to prove that there's such a demand for video that people will pay for it," says Dave Meyers, director of Korn's "Twisted Transistor" clip. "That will create a whole new business." Yahoo, which streams 350 million videos a month, agreed to pay an undisclosed fee earlier this year to Universal and other labels, and AOL made a similar deal. "It's a great new revenue stream for us," says Daniel Kruchkow, Island Def Jam's vice president of digital media. "Traditionally, we only sold videos when we had DVD compilations and stuff like that. Now, theoretically, we can sell every video we make."

New outlets continue to appear: In November, Russell Simmons helped launch DoD, an on-demand hip-hop cable channel. And in October, MTV debuted a new online service, Uber, which broadcasts videos directly to college students via their broadband Internet connections. "It's incredibly important to get your music out there to these kids who are online so much during the day," says Wayne Sharp, manager of the Click Five, whose MTV hit "Just the Girl" is also a top seller on iTunes. "The ones who aren't doing these videos are totally missing the boat."