YouTube Wants to Be Your MTV

YouTube disclosed Tuesday that it has plans to eventually offer music videos from the service in an effort to continue growing its already booming user base. The site is currently in negotiations with the major music labels, and will offer the videos at no charge to users when and if the service launches.

YouTube has essentially come from nowhere to become one of the top 50 most visited sites on the Web according to Web analytics firm comScore. The site is now the 40th most visited site with 16 million users during the month of July, a 20 percent increase over the previous month.

Within one to two years, the company's goal is to have every music video ever created on the service. Such a project would be a massive effort, and require full cooperation from the music labels. Users will be able to use the YouTube functionality to add videos to profiles and Web pages, as well as comment or post reviews on the content.

Both Warner Music Group and EMI confirmed to Reuters that they were in negotiations with the social video site, however they did not specify the nature of those discussions or how far they had progressed.

Music videos may put more strain on an already taxed system that sees 100 million pageviews per day. The heavy traffic became painfully evident for YouTube Tuesday when the site's database crashed, taking the rest of the site with it.

"We did make a very intentional decision to not immediately fail over to our redundant database but to instead bring up both databases simultaneously to ensure we had absolutely no data loss," YouTube's director of product management Maryrose Dunton said of the outage.

"Although we may have lengthened the time of our outage to do this, our number one priority was to not compromise our users' content in any way," she continued. Dunton said the site would be down temporarily again on Thursday night to attempt to prevent such an occurrence from happening in the future.