Josh Schwartz has always wanted to make a television show about the music business. Even before he created "The OC," Mr. Schwartz — who spent a good bit of his 20s hanging out at Los Angeles rock clubs — wrote a pilot called "Wall to Wall Records," about the young employees of a record label.

So you'd think that when the writers' strike of late 2007 and early 2008 halted production on Mr. Schwartz's latest series, "Gossip Girl" and "Chuck," he would have jumped at Warner Brothers Television's offer to make "Wall to Wall Records" for the company's Web venture, . But his enthusiasm for the project had wilted. "The music business has so fundamentally changed that doing something about a record label feels eight or nine years late," he said.

Record companies have faltered in the face of the digital music revolution, their profits decimated and CD sales down by almost 50 percent from what they were at the turn of the century. "That whole universe has morphed into something new and more sad," Mr. Schwartz said.

He couldn't get the idea of a music show out of his head, though. He countered the Warner Brothers proposal with a happier premise, one that, at 32, he "was starting to feel a little disconnected from": 20-somethings who hang out at a Los Angeles rock club.

"What if it's about the kids who go to the clubs, the fans of the music, instead?" he said. "That world hasn't changed at all."

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Music isn't the only part of the entertainment business that has changed, and not for the better. The double whammy of the 100-day writers' strike and online competition has left even hit shows on the broadcast networks well below their pre-strike ratings. With both networks and musical acts scrambling to connect with audiences, a music-oriented TV series available on iTunes and , with links to bands' MySpace pages — and with Mr. Schwartz and his longtime music supervisor, Alex Patsavas (the tastemaker of her own label, Chop Shop Records), as executive producers — could be the kind of venture that heralds a new era in online TV.

Mr. Schwartz and Ms. Patsavas's series, "Rockville, CA," makes its debut on Tuesday with the first four of its five- to seven-minute episodes. Set in the fictitious Club Rockville in Los Angeles — the name is a homage to the 1984 REM song "(Don't Go Back to) Rockville" — the 20-episode season follows Hunter (Andrew J. West), an archetype familiar to devotees of Mr. Schwartz's series: he's the dark-haired, hyperarticulate, self-deprecating, self-professed nerd, like Seth Cohen of "The OC," Dan Humphrey of "Gossip Girl" and Chuck of, uh, "Chuck."

In this case he's a music blogger with a crush on Deb (Alexandra Chando from "As the World Turns"), an A&R rep for Wall to Wall Records. Deb, whose primary trait is her obsessive use of the word "major" (as in "that band is major"), comes to the club to see and sign her favorite acts.

Those acts — a diverse mix of established (the indie rock band Eagles of Death Metal), up-and-coming (the synth-pop singer-songwriter Lights), foreign (the Swedish singer Lykke Li) and local artists (the power-pop group the Broken West) — are as essential to "Rockville" as Hunter and Deb's budding romance. Each episode was shot at the Echoplex, a real rock club in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and takes place in one night, with a single band playing in the background. The show's home page on features interviews with those bands and exclusive live performances of two of each band's songs.

"It's how people find music now," Ms. Patsavas explained. "They don't go to their record store anymore."