No
one should be too surprised to find out that money was involved.
The
following video does have language bleeped out, but there is a lot of it, and
the attitude is a little abrasive. It also makes me laugh and has some truth in
it, so watch if you want to:
There
is a factor that was not mentioned in the video but that still played a role,
relating to advertising dollars. When MTV initially launched, people watched
for the novelty alone. There would be videos you loved and videos that you
didn't, but it was all so new that people would tune in. There would still be
some influence by demographic issues and time zones, but people tuned in. That
level of fascination couldn't last.
While
from one point of view every video was an ad - promoting the song, album, and
band - the channel still needed advertisers. Advertisers buy in blocks, but if
you don't know who is watching when, or that they don't have a motive to switch
away any time a lame video comes on, it's hard to feel confident in the
investment.
Programming
still provided some answers to this. Some times of day would have a theme
instead of random videos. That's how we get "Yo MTV Raps", "Club
MTV", "Headbangers' Ball", and "120 Minutes". (I
assume VH1's "Pop-Up Video" filled a similar role, though I don't
remember them having a lot of shows.)
They
did other shows too. I loved the game show "Remote Control", got into
"The Monkees" enough to go to their reunion tour (which I doubt would
have happened without MTV airing the shows), and once they started airing
"Monty Python's Flying Circus", my friends and I started quoting it a
lot. I never got into "The Young Ones" but it didn't bother me that
it was on.
None
of this was awful so far. The turning point is widely recognized as the debut
of "The Real World" in 1992, launching a craze of annoying shows
depicting horrible people doing stupid things (for fun, mix and match those
nouns and adjectives), but which many find fascinating and they are often quite
inexpensive to shoot.
Since
the station was generally getting music videos free, any shooting expense for
any series should have been less attractive than the free music videos, but I
think there are a few factors that came into play, based on my own experience.
The
truth is I had sort of already left MTV behind. In 1992 I was in college, and I
could go down to the basement and probably find the right channel on one of the
two communal televisions, if no one else was already watching something
different, but it didn't happen that often. Then I was on my mission, and not
watching any television.
I
did try again, in August 1994, and it didn't appeal to me. I saw grunge and rap,
and everything had kind of a nasty edge. I know the bands that I did like made
music videos, but maybe I didn't have time to wait around for them. There was
work, and finishing college, and always something that needed to be done.
The
music changes, and what's in style changes . In the video when he says what
artists they would be playing today, he is absolutely right. There was briefly
a channel (I think it was a VH1 spin-off) that was playing old videos from the
'80s. We did tune in and watch it for a while, but still, who has time for that?
So maybe some of that nostalgia is not only for watching music videos, but for
having enough free time that watching random videos is a reasonable use of
time, and for being the desired demographic. Once your tastes were hot
contemporary, and now they are oldies. I can sympathize with that.
Videos
may still be free, but the record labels do not have the budgets that they did.
That point about the phones being shown in every video, and being the reason
that the video is paid for, is completely true. I can think of awkward phone
placement in videos by at least two of my favorite bands, and they aren't even
particularly new videos. Frankly, that's weird; shouldn't there be more than
one type of product that can benefit from product placement? Why is it always
phones?
Regardless,
needing product placement is a budget issue, and it is one that came from
people no longer buying music. Again, record companies were too slow to adapt,
the amounts of money were ridiculous for what the labels actually did, and Napster
was a huge missed opportunity.
I
have written about that before. If I have something new to say, it will work
it's way out, but for the next phase I want to focus on music videos
themselves. What do they do and what can they do? Which ones work, which ones
fail, and why? I have been planning on doing this since at least last June. (I
have reasons to believe Frank Iero is my spirit animal, but if not, it's
probably a tortoise.)
So,
lots of video links coming up. For now, here are some previous posts, and the
books that influenced them, and influenced this post.
Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record
Industry in the Digital Age, by Steve Knopper
Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation by Jeff Chang
I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, by Craig Marks and Rob
Tannenbaum
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