MTV STAY OFF THE AIR
Millennials and Gen Z may not know this, but MTV used to play music videos.
From the early 80s until somewhere around the mid-90s, MTV became a cultural touchpoint of sorts for almost every teenager in America whose household could afford basic cable (or knew someone who had cable at their house), particularly once it started producing dedicated genre shows like Headbangers Ball, Alternative Nation, Yo! MTV Raps and 120 Minutes.
Robert Dean at Consequence of Sound wants to bring that back. His reasoning: in the age of Spotify, Pandora, YouTube and generic commercial radio, it’s ironically harder than ever to discover new music, in large part because there’s no shared community to hip you to new stuff and force you out of your comfort zone:
Like our politics, everything exists in an echo chamber; we’re not sharing a space to find things anymore. We link directly to a Spotify playlist and let it do the work. There’s no unexpected magic. It’s not rock and roll. It’s safe.
Dean argues that MTV served this purpose admirably in its heyday:
Those shows worked on the simple premise of if you like this thing, let us show you these other things like it. There are blogs curated to tastes and algorithms that help us to discover similar artists, but the shared cultural experience of the music video, not knowing what would come next, the charisma of the host … all of those things played a role in the growth of the music. There’s value to that magic.
And that’s why we need to make MTV all about music again and become that central cultural community, he says.
I agree that some kind of community is essential to discovering new music. I strongly disagree with the proposition that MTV is the solution.
1. For a start, I think MTV’s role as community enabler is overstated. I mean, yes, programs like Headbangers Ball or Yo! MTV Raps had a fan base. But a shared cultural experience is not the same thing as a community. Communities are generally local and interactive. MTV was not that - it was a standard top-down model where tastemakers are telling you what cool bands you should be checking out (most of which are already signed to majors or imprints of majors). Personally, I’ve gotten more worthwhile music recommendations from actual people I’ve met and hang out with than from MTV block programming.
2. To be sure, MTV played a role as an aggregator to play music their audience might not have heard before, and then those people would go and report to you, or you’ll watch it together and share that moment of discovery. But radio can serve the same purpose - and in fact did just that at one point before everything became computer-generated playlists from corporate HQ distributed to the local affiliates.
Yes, radio is also a top-down tastemaker model, but it has the potential to be much more responsive to the community, and it’s more interactive in the sense that you could phone up the DJ, particularly for block programming shows where the DJ presumably loved this music as much as you did.
Nowadays, maybe MTV could do that by leveraging social media channels. But again, radio can do that too. NPR already does it, to astonishing effect via things like Tiny Desk Concerts, Viking’s Choice and All Songs Considered - and while NPR is a national network, it makes use of hundreds of local affiliates to explore more localized music options (or be the place to catch someone like Jeff Lynne while he's in town).
3. In fact, thanks to social media and the internet, I think the “community” hasn’t disappeared so much as fragmented into smaller tribes that defy geography and genre. I participate in several Facebook pages that serve as an example of what modern music communities look like - a bunch of people from similar but slightly different musical backgrounds sharing what they love. It might be fairly eclectic or highly specific (for example, I’ve seen various pages dedicated to fans of Syd-Barret-era Pink Floyd). But it’s still a community - and IMO it’s more of a community than any MTV block program ever was.
4. Which is why I don’t think MTV can serve as the music-discovery community Dean thinks it used to be - at least not by simply by returning to its music roots and focusing more on block programming, which is what Dean is suggesting. MTV came of age in an era when linear broadcast TV was the only option and hardly anyone else was doing what MTV was doing. We don’t live in that era anymore, and the Millennial/Gen Z crowd grew up with a completely different reality. You might as well ask a teenager to trade in their iTunes account for a Walkman.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I should confess I wasn’t a big fan of most of MTV’s specialty shows in the first place, although 120 Minutes was alright, but I didn’t tune in regularly. To be honest, the only 90s era MTV show I watched regularly was Liquid Television, which wasn’t even a music show.
In terms of discovering new music (and I’m old enough to say this), I have to say that MTV was at its most interesting in the early 80s when it first started - partly from the novelty, but mostly from the fact that not many bands were making music videos, so MTV would literally play almost anything to fill up 24 hours, so you would end up seeing all kinds of nifty bands you’d never hear on the radio, especially late at night.
So for my money, MTV broke more new bands for me in its first couple of years than it ever did on a given block show that only aired for two hours per week.
Money for nothing and chix for free,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1634576.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
From the early 80s until somewhere around the mid-90s, MTV became a cultural touchpoint of sorts for almost every teenager in America whose household could afford basic cable (or knew someone who had cable at their house), particularly once it started producing dedicated genre shows like Headbangers Ball, Alternative Nation, Yo! MTV Raps and 120 Minutes.
Robert Dean at Consequence of Sound wants to bring that back. His reasoning: in the age of Spotify, Pandora, YouTube and generic commercial radio, it’s ironically harder than ever to discover new music, in large part because there’s no shared community to hip you to new stuff and force you out of your comfort zone:
Like our politics, everything exists in an echo chamber; we’re not sharing a space to find things anymore. We link directly to a Spotify playlist and let it do the work. There’s no unexpected magic. It’s not rock and roll. It’s safe.
Dean argues that MTV served this purpose admirably in its heyday:
Those shows worked on the simple premise of if you like this thing, let us show you these other things like it. There are blogs curated to tastes and algorithms that help us to discover similar artists, but the shared cultural experience of the music video, not knowing what would come next, the charisma of the host … all of those things played a role in the growth of the music. There’s value to that magic.
And that’s why we need to make MTV all about music again and become that central cultural community, he says.
I agree that some kind of community is essential to discovering new music. I strongly disagree with the proposition that MTV is the solution.
1. For a start, I think MTV’s role as community enabler is overstated. I mean, yes, programs like Headbangers Ball or Yo! MTV Raps had a fan base. But a shared cultural experience is not the same thing as a community. Communities are generally local and interactive. MTV was not that - it was a standard top-down model where tastemakers are telling you what cool bands you should be checking out (most of which are already signed to majors or imprints of majors). Personally, I’ve gotten more worthwhile music recommendations from actual people I’ve met and hang out with than from MTV block programming.
2. To be sure, MTV played a role as an aggregator to play music their audience might not have heard before, and then those people would go and report to you, or you’ll watch it together and share that moment of discovery. But radio can serve the same purpose - and in fact did just that at one point before everything became computer-generated playlists from corporate HQ distributed to the local affiliates.
Yes, radio is also a top-down tastemaker model, but it has the potential to be much more responsive to the community, and it’s more interactive in the sense that you could phone up the DJ, particularly for block programming shows where the DJ presumably loved this music as much as you did.
Nowadays, maybe MTV could do that by leveraging social media channels. But again, radio can do that too. NPR already does it, to astonishing effect via things like Tiny Desk Concerts, Viking’s Choice and All Songs Considered - and while NPR is a national network, it makes use of hundreds of local affiliates to explore more localized music options (or be the place to catch someone like Jeff Lynne while he's in town).
3. In fact, thanks to social media and the internet, I think the “community” hasn’t disappeared so much as fragmented into smaller tribes that defy geography and genre. I participate in several Facebook pages that serve as an example of what modern music communities look like - a bunch of people from similar but slightly different musical backgrounds sharing what they love. It might be fairly eclectic or highly specific (for example, I’ve seen various pages dedicated to fans of Syd-Barret-era Pink Floyd). But it’s still a community - and IMO it’s more of a community than any MTV block program ever was.
4. Which is why I don’t think MTV can serve as the music-discovery community Dean thinks it used to be - at least not by simply by returning to its music roots and focusing more on block programming, which is what Dean is suggesting. MTV came of age in an era when linear broadcast TV was the only option and hardly anyone else was doing what MTV was doing. We don’t live in that era anymore, and the Millennial/Gen Z crowd grew up with a completely different reality. You might as well ask a teenager to trade in their iTunes account for a Walkman.
FULL DISCLOSURE: I should confess I wasn’t a big fan of most of MTV’s specialty shows in the first place, although 120 Minutes was alright, but I didn’t tune in regularly. To be honest, the only 90s era MTV show I watched regularly was Liquid Television, which wasn’t even a music show.
In terms of discovering new music (and I’m old enough to say this), I have to say that MTV was at its most interesting in the early 80s when it first started - partly from the novelty, but mostly from the fact that not many bands were making music videos, so MTV would literally play almost anything to fill up 24 hours, so you would end up seeing all kinds of nifty bands you’d never hear on the radio, especially late at night.
So for my money, MTV broke more new bands for me in its first couple of years than it ever did on a given block show that only aired for two hours per week.
Money for nothing and chix for free,
This is dF
This entry was originally posted at https://defrog.dreamwidth.org/1634576.html. Please comment there using OpenID.