Friday, January 27, 2006

Entertainment: Can Somebody Please Fix AOL Latino?

AOL is like Bally's Fitness, one of those annoying over-priced things you seem to sign up with for life. Whatever, I admit it I am a long-time AOL subscriber, maybe its the convenience of having the same main email addy there for the past decade or so.

So they do the whole AOL Latino thing, so I put it up as my preference. '

Content wise, they are months behind everything else, be it Univision, Es-Mas, or Yahoo.

Like today they have "Super Estrenos" or supposedly new tunes.

Check out the listing:

'Don't Bother' - Shakira
'I Don't Care' - Ricky Martin
'La cadena de oro' - Cabas
'Reggaetón latino' - Don Omar
'Baby Blues' - Andrea Echeverri

Admittedly, they deserve major props on the Andrea Echeverri tune, she is a genius, and the Shakira single qualifies as new.

Bu WTF is up with the Don Omar, Ricky Martin and Cabas songs? Those were on heavy rotation on Mun2, MTV, and "Hurban" radio, months ago.

Not that AOL Latino doesn't have some truly neat features, such as the Sessiones @ AOL, which is top acts like Bacilos and Juanes in private sessions. They have also aired music by acts like Plastilina Mosh, Volumen Cero, and Kinky when these were pretty much ignored by the Univision/Televisa cartel.

But ultimately, new is new, and these people need to keep their content extremely fresh, if they really want to make serious inroads among Latinos in the US of A, particularly young kids. you need to keep the content at least as current as what you can see or hear on TV or the radio, in order for it to be relevant. In an ideal world, AOL Latino's music section would complement what a Miami or Houston resident would be able to see on Mun2. Maybe it is the fact that the content part can actualy be good sometimes, but it is maddening to see them so far behind in some respects.

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