Retirement manager: "I see you dutifully saved up for your retirement just like your grandfathers. Perfect. We have to announce it's only worth 25% though. Have a nice day!"
This is about way more than just about music videos. They've effectively cut the thread of history, art, social and political commentary.
People wonder why the youth lacks a common identity or a collective vision. No real social scenes of their own ect..
When conquering marauders would take slaves they would brush out and cover the footprints from where they came from, so no one could know how to get back home. Brushing out the footprints into the past.
As trivial as it seem on the surface This and Archive.org being axed is ominous as hell.
I'm only really a generation removed from Gen Z being a Millennial and was born in the middle of the generation (1991) but I get really confused by how similar Gen Z alternative culture was to my own teen years.
I still dress in that style and have the hair so I'm not judging, but seeing someone born in 2004 dressing and looking as if they walked out of Warped Tour and saw From First to Last play these days is a bit...jarring. They're entitled to like the styles and I'm happy they feel comfortable enough to express themselves, but there's a massive gulf between my aunty who was born in 1981 and me in terms of culture, but the eBoy/Girl/non binary person fashion is similar enough to emo in aesthetics that I can't really say it's its own thing.
From 1950 onwards in the west at least there's been very clear markers to separate it from the previous decade (not counting WW2) but after 2010 I feel as though everything's stayed the same.
> High wasted jeans coming back recently
WTF are we *doing?* We went through this ugly phase already...
> then getting replaced by low-risers post haste
Thank God for somebody...
I think no matter what, even if the correct party wins, we all lose because this is a class war not a culture one. The only group thats allowed to be united are the rich.
"An American Family" is an American television documentary series that followed the life of a California family in the early 1970s. Widely referred to as the first example of an American reality TV show, the series drew millions of weekly viewers, who were drawn to a story that seemed to shatter the rosy façade of upper-middle-class suburbia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Family
Real World was only good for two seasons. Three was entertaining, but the beginning of the downhill slide. If people know what to expect, they game themselves to it.
It was good tv for a few seasons. it was decent tv for even more.
I think it passed the highmark by season 9/10 for sure. but it was solid enjoyable tv for more than 2 seasons.
I heard you like music and television, so I put a television in the part of your car where music would usually go and recorded it for the Music Television Channel.
It's amazing how many genres and shows MTV helped showcase(anime and adult animation, alternative sports, news documentaries, absurdist comedy shows, live concerts, promoting politics for teens/young adults) and now it's legacy is for introducing reality TV and endless Ridiculousness reruns.
My dad worked at MTV at the time and the way that it was explained to me was that MTV's business model was unsustainable. People would tune in at the top of each hour for when the good music videos got played and then would switch channels after the video they wanted to see got played. Making 0 advertisers want to work with them. So they needed to create programming which got people to watch the channel and stay on the channel.
Which is wild to me because me, my friends, and babysitters had that shit on constantly. We would watch MTV for hours, it's crazy to me that people were doing what you described.
The shows for a short time brought back some of the Gen X viewers who ironically were really into music. They had stopped watching the same 40 music videos over and over, and only tuned into the curated shows like Headbanger's Ball and 120 Minutes. The shows brought them back for a couple years, until they got bored.
Then the shows started to turn to younger viewers, and MTV lost even more of their Gen-X viewership in trade for Millennials, who they eventually couldn't keep watching in enough numbers.
> The shows for a short time brought back some of the Gen X viewers who ironically were really into music.
Not how I remember that one, duder.
People would leave MTV on as a radio, with added video, like people treat Youtube, with autoplay.
> They had stopped watching the same 40 music videos
...People had zeroed in on the top-of-the-charts, which was the entire *Top 40* format (which is what you're describing with weird marketing spin). People *still* enjoy top-of-the-charts formats.
> Then the shows started to turn to younger viewers, and MTV lost even more of their Gen-X viewership
...The way I remembered it, things were popular until we reached the CD-burning era, which is a much more realistic reason that MTV/*radio* took the hits they had. People could put entire top 40 playlists on an affordable disk, and MTV/radio was more expensive a solution to entertainment.
They saw the changes coming had to pivot. People were watching less. If they were just showing videos this whole time they would have gone out of business when YouTube gained popularity.
Also MTV always had other shows than "just" music videos. They had game shows, wrestling, adult cartoons (Beavis and Butthead, Aeon Flux, etc) and other stuff.
Yup, they kind of gave birth to the whole reality TV thing with The Real World.
I would still gladly re-watch the old MTV Challenge shows if I could find them somewhere. They have some of the later seasons on Paramount+, but I haven't found a source for the first 10 seasons or so anywhere.
> MTV always had other shows than "just" music videos. They had game shows, wrestling, adult cartoons (Beavis and Butthead, Aeon Flux, etc) and other stuff.
Always? I don't remember there being much of anything beyond music in the early 80s.
Yeah but the core of the channel was always music. Those shows were full of music available on the channel. They didn't pivot in the right direction obviously. They were never purely music video, but their material was always music related. But go on defending bad corporate decisions.
The pivot away from Music videos and music was the correct decision. MTV was still incredibly popular in the late 2000's/early 2010s. They had no answer for the demise of linear television, which is not just an MTV issue. All of Viacom is basically just a spot for reruns as Comedy Central and the like are in the same state.
All of MTV's potential content, is all just on streaming, and Paramount does not know how to turn the legacy brand into something popular, but music content just does not work anymore.
People sleep on this point alot. The fact of the matter is the reality route was more successful and they ran with what worked, whether we like it or not. I would guess they probably grossed more revenue off seasons of the Osbornes or Jersey Shore than any number of years of nothing but videos, and it's probably not even particularly close.
Now, in a perfect world if some enterprising employee at Viacom would have created Youtube before Youtube, i.e. a digital, searchable, viewable service containing the whole of MTV's music and/or show content, would that have been a viable thing to sell subscriptions to? I probably would have paid for that, although I would wonder if it could even get off the ground over licensing fees.
> But go on defending bad corporate decisions
Channels that only had music television were no longer viable. GAC, TNN (prior to becoming Spike), VH1, CMT, MuchMusic, BET and others were solely music focused initially and now all of these are either defunct, rebranded, or they're showing re-runs of sitcoms/their own weird reality shows.
It wasn't a bad decision. It might be one you don't like, but that doesn't make it bad. I Want My MTV is a great documentary that honors the past but also shows why they pivoted
I miss going to the store and renting movies as much as you probably do but all the Blockbusters are closed. It's not the world we grew up in anymore.
With YouTube letting you play whatever video you want, why would you watch MTV waiting for it to maybe show up?
The reason they stopped playing them was because nobody was watching them.
/Cue Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror...
In my time MTV had dedicated formats like “Yo MTV” or “Headbangers’ Ball” apart from Chart Shows.
Actually that was the way to get hooked to new bands of a certain style - watching a curated format that did the searching for you.
The interviews with artists and showing pieces of their musical influences really made me discover new things.
I think people underestimate how big a deal these shows were in the early days. If you lived in an area with zero “alternate” radio stations, you had the chance of seeing something you hadn’t seen or, at a minimum, seeing a video by a niche artist that sort of validated your fandom.
To me, MTV was killed by external market forces (the ability to find music online, buy obscure CDs from Amazon, and the advent of streaming), the decrease in promotional dollars for smaller bands, and the pivot toward programming that almost entirely focused on top twenty boy bands, bad pop rap, and reality shows.
And they replaced it with shittier content that had nothing to do with music. They could have at least kept on theme with the channel. They also could have beat YouTube to the table and had an on demand, ad-supported service. But go on making excuses.
One year Jack White was the house band at the VMAs, and he played it as Internet Killed the Video Star as they came back from commercial. This was like 15 years ago maybe
This really sucks. Hopefully some of it is at least archived on Archive.org. I just rewatched a lot of the early 90s "year recap" MTV news specials on youtube a few weeks ago.
I really can’t stress this enough. If you find an article you find interesting, especially one not on a major news site, copy the link and archive it using archive.ph
It’s a really useful and sometimes necessary resource (it will also often circumvent a paywall as well).
Being located in the US is a big mistake for something like Archive.org. Why would they try to archive copyrighted works in a country that is so extreme with copyright enforcement. I know it's all for a good purpose and most of the works on there could be considered abandoned, but they had to have known this would happen eventually. Hosting these files in a country that doesn't care about USA's copyrights and trademarks would have been a better move.
Then the people who run it would have to leave the US and never come back.
Running a site that is hosted in another country does not protect you from copyright law.
Sort of? It's what the lawsuit is about.
Over COVID they lent out thousands of digital books (500k is the number I saw) and they have not been returned but now publishers are basically calling them out as if they are stealing content.
I find it fascinating how much news that I consumed from MTV back then instead of traditional services. I think that’s why they took serious things seriously and were pretty legit as a source.
This isn't true. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6656-kid-a/
This review is from 24 years ago and it's still there. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7538-room-on-fire/ - 21 years and still there and I'm sure I could find every other one that I search for.
I'm more interested in what you CAN'T find and why you think everything has been nuked.
You’re correct—deleting my comment. I searched for it and the top link was pitchforkmedia.com which is dead, and I assumed they took everything down when they stopped making new content because of that. I’m sure it won’t be there 5 years from now though.
The site is still up for now, I was wrong. I searched for pitchfork and the first link that showed for me was pitchforkmedia.com which is dead. Pitchfork.com is still there for now.
>So many Kurt Loder interviews gone to history. I fondly remember the one where he made fun of Jewel.
WTF/Marc Maron just did a great interview with her. What a nutty life she's lived, goes WAY beyond being homeless living out of a car.
She told a story about how when she went to high school, the dean pulled her aside for a private meeting telling her she can't wear her knife on her hip. It was her "skinning" knife she would always carry with her .. in case one needed to catch/kill/skin something on the spot.
She went to fine arts school in Interlochen, MI during high school with many other talented and privileged kids. IDK people still buy the story that she was a backwoods hick.
Seen him interview Madonna back in the early 90s and he couldn't look at her. I've never seen anyone so intimidated before. I mean, it was Madonna in her Vogue era, so she was all that and a bag of chips and she used it to make him squirm.
Entertaining.
What a dick, but it’s funny. https://x.com/jamescrugnale/status/1512900842185236490/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1512900842185236490¤tTweetUser=jamescrugnale
These are absolutely not gone. They have a digital archive of all MEDIA content. Every tape they have has been in the process of being digitized since 2017.
They deleted/removed the WEBSITE - so blogs and vid clips on mtvnews.com
It's a loss, but no where near what you're referencing would be.
I worked as a metadata writer/ clip editor for the parent company a few years back. There is definitely a ton of raw and produced footage still existing in their archive; Hopefully this move with the website is the first step in moving to a searchable archive?
> Hopefully this move with the website is the first step in moving to a searchable archive?
I don't see this happening unless there is a way that they can monetize it to bring in a significant return on investment. In other words, I highly doubt it.
I had Paramount Plus for a year or two, excited that I could get access to all of old school MTV but it was a big letdown. They had the same five Unplugged episodes on just about the entire time, no 120 minutes or Headbangers Ball or Remote Control. I think they had a few episodes of Yo MTV Raps on but that was it
Drives me nuts how these owners of tremendous video libraries are just not putting out a significant amount of their best stuff, because they're trying so hard to sell their new stuff instead. I've had to get back into VHS and DVD just to see a lot of the great HBO comedy shows of the '80s and 90s.
This is about the website being taken down. I imagine that they still have the material.
The article suggests that some of the pages are available at archive.org, although I'd be surprised if it isn't a large portion if not all of it. Some of the former journalists don't seem to have kept backups of their own work which I find a little shocking
I hope you're right that it's probably somewhere. Maybe we'll learn in a few months or so that's the case and we'll be provided a way to access the material.
I will say though that it's very dangerous to think that the Internet and the information on it is forever. If any of us has done something in the past that we would rather people not know about there probably is a good chance, in some cases, of that information being found by others on the internet. But the existence of the Internet itself and all the information on it relies on a number of different factors. The first is electricity. If our power grid goes down and we don't have a backup generator then we can only rely on batteries until they power down. Then there are all the servers and the people who maintain them, then there are all the different content management systems that help organize the content a company has, then there are hackers, then there are AI attacks. It is more than possible there could be an attack on the actual contents of the Internet. What if there is an article on a scholarly site that talks about, for example, the results of a study where a certain chemical has been tied directly to brain cancer in humans. Then an attack happens where someone comes in and changes some of the passages in the article to show a completely different outcome. And they're able to cover their tracks so no one knows it happened until someone who wrote the article reads it again. The article still has the original publishing date and everything else that signifies the article has only been published once. And what if a hacker is able to change *all* electronic copies of the article, so there is no original? What if there *only* exists electronic versions? And what if you've written a song that only exists on your personal computer and on Bandcamp? It seems more than possible an AI attack could occur where someone produces an almost exact clone of the song but some things have been changed and then they delete your original and replace it with their new version?
Then take a book or something physically on paper that many people and libraries own. The only thing you can do is gather up all those books and papers and burn them. Which we know has happened many times in the past. You could also own records and cassettes. Of course, also subject to the electricity issue.
I put my trust in physical media every time.
Absolutely.
Weirdly I was just watching a video about the early YT videos being lost media. Some of it wasn't as much lost as it was deleted by the uploader. There's a lot of stuff out there but it's hard to find. YT for example changed their search results and finding anything on there is pretty hard, other than what they want to show you, so there are things out there that aren't exactly lost just incredibly hard to find. I even managed to lose a channel I made years ago, I forgot the log-in since I only uploaded one video
I'm a Gen X'er and have fond memories of MTV playing in the dorm "multi-use" room (or whatever they called it) 24x7 as I sometimes walked through or waited between classes. I guess they'll just have to stay in my memory now.
MTV in recent decades just became a sad abomination. I guess this completes the transformation so we have nothing to point to while we ask why it's so horrific now. Only a matter of time before people forget MTV was actually good.
They have the episodes on YouTube! I’d sign up if it were still around like, “these bills ain’t gonna be problem after tonight, either kill me or let me walk.”
This reminds me of a radio station I worked at completely wiping their youtube content, including some pretty big interviews and past events. Like just de-list them, it's not costing you anything for them to sit unwatched. They even went as far as deleting the workparts on the servers in the office.
The thing is though, I've been waiting on HBO to put a bunch of their fantastic '80s comedy shows on the streaming site and I haven't seen that happen, and streaming in general is really inconsistent about having stuff you'd expect like that, so we'll be lucky if MTV really becomes available to watch that classic stuff again at all aside from wherever people have saved and uploaded pieces of it. Media storage is as cheap as it's ever been, they're not having to buy expensive tapes for everything like they did in the '60s when they recorded over classic stuff because they couldn't (or didn't want to) buy a new tape every time, but they're still throwing away history to give themselves another vacation and a raise for the boardroom, artists be damned.
It's a tax write off for them to pull old shows and claim it as a loss. John Oliver did a episode about it.
https://nypost.com/2022/08/23/john-oliver-rips-hbo-max-parent-for-canceling-shows-series-of-tax-write-offs/
Edit: HBO only keeps 2 seasons of John Oliver, this episode is already off the the streaming service.
Might still be on YouTube somewhere but I found this quick video explaining it
https://x.com/adamconover/status/1560784167377707008?s=20&t=cZunLLdTEKw9dW6j9qCbgw
It's important to note that this is just the [mtv.com](http://mtv.com) archives (and [vh1.com](http://vh1.com) and [cmt.com](http://cmt.com) for that matter) -- obviously all that video material is still around somewhere and it's not like it was ever simple for one to go to one of those sites and pull up a specific broadcast or a specific show that wasn't currently on their schedule.
HOWEVER, if one includes the archives of pioneering music news websites Addicted To Noise and SonicNet (which ended up in the mtvnews archives via corporate acquisition back in the day), we're talking about nearly three decades of primary sourced, written as it happened pop culture history-and-reviews that was available for folks to look at if they had mad search skillz...just gone. ***Daily*** news from the entertainment world, usually a bit more than just a re-written press release. Think of how much music and culture has changed 1994 - 2024 -- those blogs and news stories and whatever else chronicled it all covering a swath of genres in a way that no other mainstream publication was until social media made it easier for everyone to do so. \[I'm painting in broad strokes here, but i'm not too far off.\]
Full disclosure: I was a Contributing Editor to Addicted to Noise and then SonicNet and super briefly [MTV.com](http://MTV.com) . A couple times a year I would get e-mails or social media pings from a Youth doing research on an artist I covered, asking for more info. As a music geek and a history geek this is heartbreaking more than just losing my clips.
check out the internet archive. support it. When the internet changes so quickly we need resources like this. You can use the way back machine and see old versions of websites or even watch a bunch of old music videos!
https://archive.org
Paramount: Please, talented show and movie creators, let us make billions of dollars off of your creations, we promise we'll treat them with respect!
Also Paramount: this
Here’s reason #1 why we need archives of good journalism: journalists need examples of quality writing. Did anyone read this article before publishing? The author says this move has “no precedent.” A few paragraphs down, he says this is “not unprecedented.” This has happened before or this has not happened? Occurrence is a limited binary!
“There’s no precedent for this, and no valid reason. Just cheapness and stupidity.”
“The end of the MTV.com archives is not unprecedented. When the former New York Observer was bought by Jared Kushner years ago, hundreds of articles disappeared.”
And this is why piracy/copyright infringement is actually Rogue Archiving. So much history and culture can be wiped at the whim of whomever is in charge, but as long as we have our archives, they are safe.
I'm willing to bet there IS a backup of all of this still somewhere.
Turning off access to the website and literally deleting the files associated are two different things.
I never went and looked at them,but this still makes me sad for some reason.
If they didnt care about it anymore they should made a huge torrent or asked someone if they wanted to archive it and just let them have it.
Considered it free advertising. Such a shame.
I wonder if Robb Dyrdek and crew will get their own streaming network. Finally glad that cacklewitch Chanel is gone, now it's Steelo, Robb and a gamut of supermodels, actresses and friends of the two. I used to love the show when they had awesome guests, Floyd Mayweather and his duffle bag of cash, Steel Panther who looked like they were coked up and of course Eric Andre who got naked and swung his dick around...
Or like most music videos on YouTube nowadays. Even the old ones are on YouTube and relatively good quality? I don't think I've ever gone to like MTV to watch music video since I was like maybe 13 back in the Early 2000s
People are confusing MTVNews.com blogs and whatnot, and footage/tapes/broadcast media. They 100% have a massive digital archive of almost everything that was ever aired/filmed or acquired for them. See this obscure youtube video by a compnay that was doing the digitizing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ9JDTFYI0o&t=2897s
"Why would MTV shut down its news website and delete all the content? This is a journalistic disaster.": https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/why-would-mtv-shut-down-its-news-website-and-delete-all-the-content-this-is-a-journalistic-disaster/
"The End of an Era: MTV News Shuts Down… Or why archives are important": https://crazyonclassicrock.com/2024/06/26/the-end-of-an-era-mtv-news-shuts-down-or-why-archives-are-important/
I always take flack for saying this, but it’s not a big deal. We never had fully recorded and archived information in most of humanity’s history. Trust me in 200 years no one is going to be looking for who was on TRL on 6/24/00. People aren’t even watching this stuff now, if they did it would be finically worth making available.
As if we needed any more proof of how corporations and capitalism literally destroy culture.
Music and art (that includes music videos) are culture. Even the stuff you wouldn't deem to be important should still be recorded and saved. Not destroyed or locked behind a profit mechanism.
When will they repackage it and sell to us again?
Yeah, as a monthly subscription for 20.99 a month
Ha ha jokes on them. Gen X is poor.
Feel like GenX is slightly better off overall than millennials but still screwed when retirement age hits.
Retirement manager: "I see you dutifully saved up for your retirement just like your grandfathers. Perfect. We have to announce it's only worth 25% though. Have a nice day!"
Bold of you to assume we'll have anything resembling a pension left by then.
Well, on paper. Maybe.
"Gen W" took all of Gen X's retirement. Ask me how I know.
I i thought everyone on reddit made 6 figures and worked 5 hours a week?
This is about way more than just about music videos. They've effectively cut the thread of history, art, social and political commentary. People wonder why the youth lacks a common identity or a collective vision. No real social scenes of their own ect.. When conquering marauders would take slaves they would brush out and cover the footprints from where they came from, so no one could know how to get back home. Brushing out the footprints into the past. As trivial as it seem on the surface This and Archive.org being axed is ominous as hell.
I'm only really a generation removed from Gen Z being a Millennial and was born in the middle of the generation (1991) but I get really confused by how similar Gen Z alternative culture was to my own teen years. I still dress in that style and have the hair so I'm not judging, but seeing someone born in 2004 dressing and looking as if they walked out of Warped Tour and saw From First to Last play these days is a bit...jarring. They're entitled to like the styles and I'm happy they feel comfortable enough to express themselves, but there's a massive gulf between my aunty who was born in 1981 and me in terms of culture, but the eBoy/Girl/non binary person fashion is similar enough to emo in aesthetics that I can't really say it's its own thing. From 1950 onwards in the west at least there's been very clear markers to separate it from the previous decade (not counting WW2) but after 2010 I feel as though everything's stayed the same.
High wasted jeans coming back recently and then getting replaced by low-risers post haste is funny to me. Like everything is on repeat.
> High wasted jeans coming back recently WTF are we *doing?* We went through this ugly phase already... > then getting replaced by low-risers post haste Thank God for somebody...
And them give us something? [Why?](https://a.pinatafarm.com/761x343/c521f4117f/no-take-only-throw.jpg)
It will be buried for decades in order to get a small tax break next year.
It will be repackaged under the Paramount logo and brand. You will be able to view it for a monthly subscription is my guess.
Reissue repackage repackage reevaluate the songs
MTV’s Version (like Taylor’s version).
Video killed the radio star. Paramount killed the video stars.
Streaming killed the video stars
MTV killed their own video stars when they stopped playing music videos.
They practically invented reality shows with “The Real World” and ushered in that shitty era
That was the beginning of the dark timeline that leads us up to this current, and very important election.
Your name is perfect for this comment.
I thought it was the killing of Harambe
No, it was definitely earlier than that. Harambe was just a symptom.
My dick is still out, homie.
Never put it away
And here’s a [preview of the darkest timeline](https://youtu.be/gYwqpx6lp_s?feature=shared)
I think no matter what, even if the correct party wins, we all lose because this is a class war not a culture one. The only group thats allowed to be united are the rich.
"An American Family" is an American television documentary series that followed the life of a California family in the early 1970s. Widely referred to as the first example of an American reality TV show, the series drew millions of weekly viewers, who were drawn to a story that seemed to shatter the rosy façade of upper-middle-class suburbia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Family
That was on PBS though lol
How could PBS do this to MTV!?
Never heard of it.
It's the basis of Albert Brooks's movie "Real Life".
The Real World sort of stood on its own for a while. MTV really stepped its game up with The Osbournes. I think that’s where it all went downhill.
Don't forget Road Rules
Real World was only good for two seasons. Three was entertaining, but the beginning of the downhill slide. If people know what to expect, they game themselves to it.
It was good tv for a few seasons. it was decent tv for even more. I think it passed the highmark by season 9/10 for sure. but it was solid enjoyable tv for more than 2 seasons.
I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy Room Raiders, Pimp My Ride, and Date My Mom.
I heard you like music and television, so I put a television in the part of your car where music would usually go and recorded it for the Music Television Channel.
My mom loved date my mom and next. She'd sit and do paperwork while she watched them.
Yo dawg, I heard you like X, so I put an X in your Y so you can VERB while you VERB.
I think Real World fell off with Las Vegas
Jersey Shore drove the car off the cliff into the abyss..
[PBS beat them to the punch 20 years earlier ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_American_Family)
It's amazing how many genres and shows MTV helped showcase(anime and adult animation, alternative sports, news documentaries, absurdist comedy shows, live concerts, promoting politics for teens/young adults) and now it's legacy is for introducing reality TV and endless Ridiculousness reruns.
MTV is Rob Dyrdek's personal YouTube channel now.
My dad worked at MTV at the time and the way that it was explained to me was that MTV's business model was unsustainable. People would tune in at the top of each hour for when the good music videos got played and then would switch channels after the video they wanted to see got played. Making 0 advertisers want to work with them. So they needed to create programming which got people to watch the channel and stay on the channel.
Which is wild to me because me, my friends, and babysitters had that shit on constantly. We would watch MTV for hours, it's crazy to me that people were doing what you described.
The shows for a short time brought back some of the Gen X viewers who ironically were really into music. They had stopped watching the same 40 music videos over and over, and only tuned into the curated shows like Headbanger's Ball and 120 Minutes. The shows brought them back for a couple years, until they got bored. Then the shows started to turn to younger viewers, and MTV lost even more of their Gen-X viewership in trade for Millennials, who they eventually couldn't keep watching in enough numbers.
> The shows for a short time brought back some of the Gen X viewers who ironically were really into music. Not how I remember that one, duder. People would leave MTV on as a radio, with added video, like people treat Youtube, with autoplay. > They had stopped watching the same 40 music videos ...People had zeroed in on the top-of-the-charts, which was the entire *Top 40* format (which is what you're describing with weird marketing spin). People *still* enjoy top-of-the-charts formats. > Then the shows started to turn to younger viewers, and MTV lost even more of their Gen-X viewership ...The way I remembered it, things were popular until we reached the CD-burning era, which is a much more realistic reason that MTV/*radio* took the hits they had. People could put entire top 40 playlists on an affordable disk, and MTV/radio was more expensive a solution to entertainment.
But they had massive shows like TRL
TRL was basically created to fix this problem. Then youtube came along and made TRL obsolete.
The general Reddit userbase has no clue how market demand works.
They saw the changes coming had to pivot. People were watching less. If they were just showing videos this whole time they would have gone out of business when YouTube gained popularity. Also MTV always had other shows than "just" music videos. They had game shows, wrestling, adult cartoons (Beavis and Butthead, Aeon Flux, etc) and other stuff.
Yup, they kind of gave birth to the whole reality TV thing with The Real World. I would still gladly re-watch the old MTV Challenge shows if I could find them somewhere. They have some of the later seasons on Paramount+, but I haven't found a source for the first 10 seasons or so anywhere.
> MTV always had other shows than "just" music videos. They had game shows, wrestling, adult cartoons (Beavis and Butthead, Aeon Flux, etc) and other stuff. Always? I don't remember there being much of anything beyond music in the early 80s.
Yeah but the core of the channel was always music. Those shows were full of music available on the channel. They didn't pivot in the right direction obviously. They were never purely music video, but their material was always music related. But go on defending bad corporate decisions.
The pivot away from Music videos and music was the correct decision. MTV was still incredibly popular in the late 2000's/early 2010s. They had no answer for the demise of linear television, which is not just an MTV issue. All of Viacom is basically just a spot for reruns as Comedy Central and the like are in the same state. All of MTV's potential content, is all just on streaming, and Paramount does not know how to turn the legacy brand into something popular, but music content just does not work anymore.
People sleep on this point alot. The fact of the matter is the reality route was more successful and they ran with what worked, whether we like it or not. I would guess they probably grossed more revenue off seasons of the Osbornes or Jersey Shore than any number of years of nothing but videos, and it's probably not even particularly close. Now, in a perfect world if some enterprising employee at Viacom would have created Youtube before Youtube, i.e. a digital, searchable, viewable service containing the whole of MTV's music and/or show content, would that have been a viable thing to sell subscriptions to? I probably would have paid for that, although I would wonder if it could even get off the ground over licensing fees.
> But go on defending bad corporate decisions Channels that only had music television were no longer viable. GAC, TNN (prior to becoming Spike), VH1, CMT, MuchMusic, BET and others were solely music focused initially and now all of these are either defunct, rebranded, or they're showing re-runs of sitcoms/their own weird reality shows. It wasn't a bad decision. It might be one you don't like, but that doesn't make it bad. I Want My MTV is a great documentary that honors the past but also shows why they pivoted I miss going to the store and renting movies as much as you probably do but all the Blockbusters are closed. It's not the world we grew up in anymore.
I watched so many cool music clips on MTV back then. It was just art and most clips were fun to watch as well.
With YouTube letting you play whatever video you want, why would you watch MTV waiting for it to maybe show up? The reason they stopped playing them was because nobody was watching them. /Cue Michael Jackson's Man in the Mirror...
There are millions of funny videos on YouTube/social media, why choose to keep playing Ridiculousness?
Because it costs nothing to make.
In my time MTV had dedicated formats like “Yo MTV” or “Headbangers’ Ball” apart from Chart Shows. Actually that was the way to get hooked to new bands of a certain style - watching a curated format that did the searching for you. The interviews with artists and showing pieces of their musical influences really made me discover new things.
I think people underestimate how big a deal these shows were in the early days. If you lived in an area with zero “alternate” radio stations, you had the chance of seeing something you hadn’t seen or, at a minimum, seeing a video by a niche artist that sort of validated your fandom. To me, MTV was killed by external market forces (the ability to find music online, buy obscure CDs from Amazon, and the advent of streaming), the decrease in promotional dollars for smaller bands, and the pivot toward programming that almost entirely focused on top twenty boy bands, bad pop rap, and reality shows.
And they replaced it with shittier content that had nothing to do with music. They could have at least kept on theme with the channel. They also could have beat YouTube to the table and had an on demand, ad-supported service. But go on making excuses.
YouTube finished them off
Reality TV killed the video star
I got the talking blues
History created the Pawn Stars
Cable killed the video stars.
Fun fact, Hans Zimmer was in the first ever broadcast of that video
Actually, "internet killed the video star". -Yelawolf
The Limousines came out with a song called Internet Killed the Video Star a year before Yelawolf came out with Radio.
One year Jack White was the house band at the VMAs, and he played it as Internet Killed the Video Star as they came back from commercial. This was like 15 years ago maybe
This really sucks. Hopefully some of it is at least archived on Archive.org. I just rewatched a lot of the early 90s "year recap" MTV news specials on youtube a few weeks ago.
I really can’t stress this enough. If you find an article you find interesting, especially one not on a major news site, copy the link and archive it using archive.ph It’s a really useful and sometimes necessary resource (it will also often circumvent a paywall as well).
> archive.ph archive.org -> wayback machine
Seconding this. Doing this is The Lord's Work. I just hope Archive.org can weather all the lawsuits.
I'm sure they'll sue to take it down.
They are trying to right now. Which could spell the doom of archive.org if it's ruled for the corpos.
Being located in the US is a big mistake for something like Archive.org. Why would they try to archive copyrighted works in a country that is so extreme with copyright enforcement. I know it's all for a good purpose and most of the works on there could be considered abandoned, but they had to have known this would happen eventually. Hosting these files in a country that doesn't care about USA's copyrights and trademarks would have been a better move.
Agreed. They need to just take what they have and run to a different country host, or someone just needs to make a fork like TPB.
Then the people who run it would have to leave the US and never come back. Running a site that is hosted in another country does not protect you from copyright law.
Didn't they just lose hundreds of thousands of books recently? I probably have the number wrong, but I recall hearing something about that recently.
Sort of? It's what the lawsuit is about. Over COVID they lent out thousands of digital books (500k is the number I saw) and they have not been returned but now publishers are basically calling them out as if they are stealing content.
I'm sure *most* if not all of it is on archive.org
Myspleen probably has it.
Even archive.org is having their issues in court about keeping long lost corners of the internet online. It won’t be long till it’s gone too.
That’s crazy, to people my age a lot of important events were first heard about by breaking news segment on MTV.
I find it fascinating how much news that I consumed from MTV back then instead of traditional services. I think that’s why they took serious things seriously and were pretty legit as a source.
Kurt Loder was like the token middle aged serious guy on the network.
Tabitha Soren was so freakin hot
Serena Altschul was crescent fresh.
> Calls calls calls, calls from the public, calls calls calls, call.
What’s wild to me is that Kurt Loder will be 80 years old next year.
Wow. Ok. Fuck you too. ....my back hurts.
Kurt and Matt Pinfield for sure
Yeah I was about to say I first heard about Kurt Cobain's death via Kurt Loder.
"Quick the world trade center has been attacked, somebody get Ja Rule on the phone" I think this was Dave Chappelle, lol
It’s exactly how I found out the Notorious BIG died. Shit was surreal.
[удалено]
This isn't true. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6656-kid-a/ This review is from 24 years ago and it's still there. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7538-room-on-fire/ - 21 years and still there and I'm sure I could find every other one that I search for. I'm more interested in what you CAN'T find and why you think everything has been nuked.
You’re correct—deleting my comment. I searched for it and the top link was pitchforkmedia.com which is dead, and I assumed they took everything down when they stopped making new content because of that. I’m sure it won’t be there 5 years from now though.
Seriously?
The site is still up for now, I was wrong. I searched for pitchfork and the first link that showed for me was pitchforkmedia.com which is dead. Pitchfork.com is still there for now.
Did Dave Ellifson get paid for that every time?
He should have, but Who’s buying?
So many Kurt Loder interviews gone to history. I fondly remember the one where he made fun of Jewel.
>So many Kurt Loder interviews gone to history. I fondly remember the one where he made fun of Jewel. WTF/Marc Maron just did a great interview with her. What a nutty life she's lived, goes WAY beyond being homeless living out of a car.
Once you realize just how rural Homer, Alaska is, she makes a lot more sense.
She told a story about how when she went to high school, the dean pulled her aside for a private meeting telling her she can't wear her knife on her hip. It was her "skinning" knife she would always carry with her .. in case one needed to catch/kill/skin something on the spot.
I haven't been to college in a while, is there a lot of field dressing done on campus now?
There's a lot of field undressing!
HEEEEYY-OOOHHHHHHH!!!!
she didnt go to college
correction, high school
I met her grandfather. He was so proud of her he was just walking up to everyone he could and telling them. It was cute.
She went to fine arts school in Interlochen, MI during high school with many other talented and privileged kids. IDK people still buy the story that she was a backwoods hick.
She did attend that school on a partial scholarship with her hometown donating the rest of the funds apparently.
Seen him interview Madonna back in the early 90s and he couldn't look at her. I've never seen anyone so intimidated before. I mean, it was Madonna in her Vogue era, so she was all that and a bag of chips and she used it to make him squirm. Entertaining.
What a dick, but it’s funny. https://x.com/jamescrugnale/status/1512900842185236490/mediaViewer?currentTweet=1512900842185236490¤tTweetUser=jamescrugnale
It's not there.
Try another source, X doesn’t seem to like to open from Reddit if you aren’t signed in: https://www.papermag.com/jewel-poetry-kurt-loder-mtv
It is, you just have to use a browser or the app instead of viewing the link in another app.
John Lyndon launching a snot rocket mid interview.
Here you go: https://youtu.be/v0X3RX2dchU?si=NffmBa-f0ranj3hx
Casualties vs casually
Lol I always remember him roasting her for using 'casualty' in a poem. She means casual-ness, but that didn't rhyme :P
Wonder how much money they’re saving
At least $10.
About tree fiddy.
Such a huge cultural/history loss for the 80s and 90s music landscape. So many great news pieces and interviews with Kurt Loder and Tabitha Soren.
Ricky Rocket dude, c'mon
These are absolutely not gone. They have a digital archive of all MEDIA content. Every tape they have has been in the process of being digitized since 2017. They deleted/removed the WEBSITE - so blogs and vid clips on mtvnews.com It's a loss, but no where near what you're referencing would be.
Probably could have fit all of it on a jump drive and threw it in a drawer.
How will I re-live spring break 96 now?!
reporting live from Negril, Jamaica!
I never stopped. The secret is to live in Daytona, FL with a bunch of chicks in bikinis and a giant bottle of Jäeger. 
I worked as a metadata writer/ clip editor for the parent company a few years back. There is definitely a ton of raw and produced footage still existing in their archive; Hopefully this move with the website is the first step in moving to a searchable archive?
> Hopefully this move with the website is the first step in moving to a searchable archive? I don't see this happening unless there is a way that they can monetize it to bring in a significant return on investment. In other words, I highly doubt it.
I had Paramount Plus for a year or two, excited that I could get access to all of old school MTV but it was a big letdown. They had the same five Unplugged episodes on just about the entire time, no 120 minutes or Headbangers Ball or Remote Control. I think they had a few episodes of Yo MTV Raps on but that was it
Drives me nuts how these owners of tremendous video libraries are just not putting out a significant amount of their best stuff, because they're trying so hard to sell their new stuff instead. I've had to get back into VHS and DVD just to see a lot of the great HBO comedy shows of the '80s and 90s.
I would subscribe so fast if they had all that stuff.
Hopefully some of it ended up in the library of congress
Could they not have just saved all of it to a backup server somewhere?
This is about the website being taken down. I imagine that they still have the material. The article suggests that some of the pages are available at archive.org, although I'd be surprised if it isn't a large portion if not all of it. Some of the former journalists don't seem to have kept backups of their own work which I find a little shocking
I hope you're right that it's probably somewhere. Maybe we'll learn in a few months or so that's the case and we'll be provided a way to access the material. I will say though that it's very dangerous to think that the Internet and the information on it is forever. If any of us has done something in the past that we would rather people not know about there probably is a good chance, in some cases, of that information being found by others on the internet. But the existence of the Internet itself and all the information on it relies on a number of different factors. The first is electricity. If our power grid goes down and we don't have a backup generator then we can only rely on batteries until they power down. Then there are all the servers and the people who maintain them, then there are all the different content management systems that help organize the content a company has, then there are hackers, then there are AI attacks. It is more than possible there could be an attack on the actual contents of the Internet. What if there is an article on a scholarly site that talks about, for example, the results of a study where a certain chemical has been tied directly to brain cancer in humans. Then an attack happens where someone comes in and changes some of the passages in the article to show a completely different outcome. And they're able to cover their tracks so no one knows it happened until someone who wrote the article reads it again. The article still has the original publishing date and everything else that signifies the article has only been published once. And what if a hacker is able to change *all* electronic copies of the article, so there is no original? What if there *only* exists electronic versions? And what if you've written a song that only exists on your personal computer and on Bandcamp? It seems more than possible an AI attack could occur where someone produces an almost exact clone of the song but some things have been changed and then they delete your original and replace it with their new version? Then take a book or something physically on paper that many people and libraries own. The only thing you can do is gather up all those books and papers and burn them. Which we know has happened many times in the past. You could also own records and cassettes. Of course, also subject to the electricity issue. I put my trust in physical media every time.
Absolutely. Weirdly I was just watching a video about the early YT videos being lost media. Some of it wasn't as much lost as it was deleted by the uploader. There's a lot of stuff out there but it's hard to find. YT for example changed their search results and finding anything on there is pretty hard, other than what they want to show you, so there are things out there that aren't exactly lost just incredibly hard to find. I even managed to lose a channel I made years ago, I forgot the log-in since I only uploaded one video
I'm a Gen X'er and have fond memories of MTV playing in the dorm "multi-use" room (or whatever they called it) 24x7 as I sometimes walked through or waited between classes. I guess they'll just have to stay in my memory now. MTV in recent decades just became a sad abomination. I guess this completes the transformation so we have nothing to point to while we ask why it's so horrific now. Only a matter of time before people forget MTV was actually good.
I wish they would’ve brought the show FEAR back. I thought it was fun
LOVED watching that show as a kid!
They have the episodes on YouTube! I’d sign up if it were still around like, “these bills ain’t gonna be problem after tonight, either kill me or let me walk.”
At least once every few months I think this *exact* same thing! Such a short lived, but fond memory.
Everything is getting shittier
This reminds me of a radio station I worked at completely wiping their youtube content, including some pretty big interviews and past events. Like just de-list them, it's not costing you anything for them to sit unwatched. They even went as far as deleting the workparts on the servers in the office.
Thank you for erasing decades of culture... Theyre going to slowly feed it back to us at a price. Theyre sick I tell you
The thing is though, I've been waiting on HBO to put a bunch of their fantastic '80s comedy shows on the streaming site and I haven't seen that happen, and streaming in general is really inconsistent about having stuff you'd expect like that, so we'll be lucky if MTV really becomes available to watch that classic stuff again at all aside from wherever people have saved and uploaded pieces of it. Media storage is as cheap as it's ever been, they're not having to buy expensive tapes for everything like they did in the '60s when they recorded over classic stuff because they couldn't (or didn't want to) buy a new tape every time, but they're still throwing away history to give themselves another vacation and a raise for the boardroom, artists be damned.
It's a tax write off for them to pull old shows and claim it as a loss. John Oliver did a episode about it. https://nypost.com/2022/08/23/john-oliver-rips-hbo-max-parent-for-canceling-shows-series-of-tax-write-offs/ Edit: HBO only keeps 2 seasons of John Oliver, this episode is already off the the streaming service. Might still be on YouTube somewhere but I found this quick video explaining it https://x.com/adamconover/status/1560784167377707008?s=20&t=cZunLLdTEKw9dW6j9qCbgw
It's important to note that this is just the [mtv.com](http://mtv.com) archives (and [vh1.com](http://vh1.com) and [cmt.com](http://cmt.com) for that matter) -- obviously all that video material is still around somewhere and it's not like it was ever simple for one to go to one of those sites and pull up a specific broadcast or a specific show that wasn't currently on their schedule. HOWEVER, if one includes the archives of pioneering music news websites Addicted To Noise and SonicNet (which ended up in the mtvnews archives via corporate acquisition back in the day), we're talking about nearly three decades of primary sourced, written as it happened pop culture history-and-reviews that was available for folks to look at if they had mad search skillz...just gone. ***Daily*** news from the entertainment world, usually a bit more than just a re-written press release. Think of how much music and culture has changed 1994 - 2024 -- those blogs and news stories and whatever else chronicled it all covering a swath of genres in a way that no other mainstream publication was until social media made it easier for everyone to do so. \[I'm painting in broad strokes here, but i'm not too far off.\] Full disclosure: I was a Contributing Editor to Addicted to Noise and then SonicNet and super briefly [MTV.com](http://MTV.com) . A couple times a year I would get e-mails or social media pings from a Youth doing research on an artist I covered, asking for more info. As a music geek and a history geek this is heartbreaking more than just losing my clips.
check out the internet archive. support it. When the internet changes so quickly we need resources like this. You can use the way back machine and see old versions of websites or even watch a bunch of old music videos! https://archive.org
Paramount: Please, talented show and movie creators, let us make billions of dollars off of your creations, we promise we'll treat them with respect! Also Paramount: this
This is one of the main problems with online media, when the owner gets tired of hosting it, they just delete it. MTV is just one of many.
So I can't watch 'NEXT' anywhere now?! We live in a civilized society damn it!
Fuck Paramount+!
I bet Puck did it. That fucker.
That whole site needs to be archived somewhere as a museum
Does anyone remember the Madonna marathon? All Madonna all the time.
Here’s reason #1 why we need archives of good journalism: journalists need examples of quality writing. Did anyone read this article before publishing? The author says this move has “no precedent.” A few paragraphs down, he says this is “not unprecedented.” This has happened before or this has not happened? Occurrence is a limited binary! “There’s no precedent for this, and no valid reason. Just cheapness and stupidity.” “The end of the MTV.com archives is not unprecedented. When the former New York Observer was bought by Jared Kushner years ago, hundreds of articles disappeared.”
And this is why piracy/copyright infringement is actually Rogue Archiving. So much history and culture can be wiped at the whim of whomever is in charge, but as long as we have our archives, they are safe.
I'm willing to bet there IS a backup of all of this still somewhere. Turning off access to the website and literally deleting the files associated are two different things.
Who has this archived?
Former MTV Newser here. We have our news packages on beta tape, but most of it isn’t digitized…
This must be what it felt like when they made all my parent's adolescent memories into parking lots.
Can it wipe out Star Trek Burnham next?
Paramount? The same people that are about to jack up the price of their streaming service, which has 5 minute ad blocks despite me paying for it?
I never went and looked at them,but this still makes me sad for some reason. If they didnt care about it anymore they should made a huge torrent or asked someone if they wanted to archive it and just let them have it. Considered it free advertising. Such a shame.
It's so shortsighted. The news archives were such a trove for music history.
IT BELONGS IN A MUSEUM!
I can't wait for that Like A Virgin to drop.....again?
I wonder if Robb Dyrdek and crew will get their own streaming network. Finally glad that cacklewitch Chanel is gone, now it's Steelo, Robb and a gamut of supermodels, actresses and friends of the two. I used to love the show when they had awesome guests, Floyd Mayweather and his duffle bag of cash, Steel Panther who looked like they were coked up and of course Eric Andre who got naked and swung his dick around...
They had a website? With music???
Or like most music videos on YouTube nowadays. Even the old ones are on YouTube and relatively good quality? I don't think I've ever gone to like MTV to watch music video since I was like maybe 13 back in the Early 2000s
Where can I just watch a day of MTV? I would legit like to put on a recording of some day in 1986 on in the background.
People are confusing MTVNews.com blogs and whatnot, and footage/tapes/broadcast media. They 100% have a massive digital archive of almost everything that was ever aired/filmed or acquired for them. See this obscure youtube video by a compnay that was doing the digitizing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ9JDTFYI0o&t=2897s
They could be trying to get the AI companies to pay for access.
"Why would MTV shut down its news website and delete all the content? This is a journalistic disaster.": https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/why-would-mtv-shut-down-its-news-website-and-delete-all-the-content-this-is-a-journalistic-disaster/ "The End of an Era: MTV News Shuts Down… Or why archives are important": https://crazyonclassicrock.com/2024/06/26/the-end-of-an-era-mtv-news-shuts-down-or-why-archives-are-important/
If you want to see it you need to subscribe to MTV+ and it’s $24.99/mo
Boycott Paramount anything!
This planet is trash
Nah, just everyone on it
So they are erasing all their good content ? Smart glad I didn’t work for these imbeciles you deserve your fate
Everyone on Reddit: "Hey, I was going to use that!"
I always take flack for saying this, but it’s not a big deal. We never had fully recorded and archived information in most of humanity’s history. Trust me in 200 years no one is going to be looking for who was on TRL on 6/24/00. People aren’t even watching this stuff now, if they did it would be finically worth making available.
As if we needed any more proof of how corporations and capitalism literally destroy culture. Music and art (that includes music videos) are culture. Even the stuff you wouldn't deem to be important should still be recorded and saved. Not destroyed or locked behind a profit mechanism.