Review: Why Did MTV Stop Playing Music?
It’s one of pop culture’s great questions: Why did MTV, a cable network literally called “Music Television,” stop playing music?
Written and hosted by Dave Holmes—himself a former MTV host—the podcast Who Killed the Video Star? offers an answer. As Holmes demonstrates, what took the M out of MTV was largely supply and demand.
When MTV premiered in 1981, music videos were a novelty; a network that played them 24/7 appealed even to cynical Gen Xers. But the format wasn’t conducive to setting competitive ad rates: The entire programming lineup was identical—a random music video, then another one—and viewers could change the channel when a song ended if they didn’t like the one that came on next.
“MTV doesn’t play music anymore” is a complaint nearly as old as the network itself, as executives embraced more conventional programming to keep viewers engaged for longer than three minutes at a time. The advent of YouTube pu
Article from Reason.com
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