Daily Download, hosted by Smith and Marianela Pereyra, is filmed live in the studio every weekday at five p.m., with celebrities dropping by to chat while teens sit on risers TRL-style. This afternoon, Jared Leto is here with his band 30 Seconds to Mars, a rock group he fronts when not acting in films like the upcoming Mark David Chapman biopic, Chapter 27. The band's appearance is interactive in the classic sense of that word - Leto pulls a kid out of the crowd to thank him for being at every show, and the band hugs and high-fives audience members. They even give everyone a ticket to their concert the following night.

"Wow," says one excited girl as the studio empties out. "I guess I'm not going home after school tomorrow either."

GROWING UP, we thought the world of MTV was so inaccessible, and maybe that's why people were so desperate to be on it that they started taking off their clothes whenever the cameras rolled around. Watching Fuse, however, is a different thing. It's casual. The stars seem relaxed. The kids joke around with them. It sort of feels like someone's basement party. Fuse gives off the vibe that, really, all the celebrity stuff is no big deal. It's music. We all love it.

"We're like the cool older brother who introduces you to new music," says Smith. "If MTV and VH1 are the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, then we're the Replacements."

Smith is also the host of Steven's Untitled Rock Show, one of the few high-visibility outlets remaining for that genre at a time when rock radio is folding across the country. Smith is a die-hard music fan in his late 20s who came to Fuse from VH1 ("back when they actually played videos"), and it's fitting that he thinks of the channel as a cool older brother, because it's exactly how he acts. When I ask if the show brings out the adolescent in him, he answers immediately, "It never left."