MTV no longer plays music videos, as most of you are painfully aware of.
VH1 also seldom plays music videos, instead with a schedule that consists heavily of reality shows.
When Fuse first went on the air, most f their programming consisted of music videos, but within a couple of years it changed. Today, most programming on Fuse is unrelated to music videos.
Could a non-niche, first-tier cable television channel with programming that consists primarily of music videos be successful today? I’m not talking about an obscure channel like"MTV Jams" that would be tucked away high in a digital tier, but rather something that would be in the two-digit channel mix with Discovery, HGTV, CNN and, yes, MTV.
MTV plays videos still don’t they? They start at like 1 or 2 in the morning, that counts right?
But no, I don’t think a “two digit” channel could survive as a 24/7 music video channel. They’d have to do shows and stuff like Beavis & Butthead that would have pieces of music videos in the middle or some such to at least break up the monotony.
Or perhaps several hours of interviews with whole bands talking about how the made such and such video. Or just some damn thing different than all music videos.
It would probably also help it they didn’t play only “mainstream” shit all the time for their videos.
Back in MTV’s video days, I’d often keep it on while I was doing something else (reading, hanging with friends) - basically, I treated it as a radio station with images. Any break from the monotony would have just distracted me.
I doubt I was the only one to do this; and as a business model, it isn’t that bad. It’s not as if I didn’t hear the commercials.
MTV, VH1 and the like didn’t steer away from Music Videos because they were failing they just discovered that other niche programming drew better ratings. It’s not that they were losing money, it’s just that they wanted more.
You could absolutely start a channel with nothing but music on it and make a profit. You’d probably have to really offer the cable companies a sweetheart deal to get them to carry it in the low digits, but if your subscriber fees are low enough and the cable company can fill a hole or replace a poor performing channel with a higher fee you’d be in like flynn.
You might be low rated and you might be making a small profit, but there’s nothing about it that would make it impossible. I’m pretty sure the programming costs would be insanely cheap, the record companies would practically pay you to run the videos as they are advertising for the albums. This might have changed since the MTV days but I’m guessing not since MTV and VH1 run those during their least profitable hours.
The biggest barrier is the cost of entry, what with the studios and facilities and equipment but you could cut corners on most of it if you eschewed the entire vee-jay conceit and literally ran nothing but videos and commercials. I’m not sure what the cost of putting out the signal to satellites is but considering some of the obscure, low rated TV channels out there on deep cable it can’t be too much.
CMT used to play only music videos, now they’re like MTV and VH1. GAC still mostly plays music videos. I don’t watch it very often, but it seemed like they only stopped playing videos to show a music related news program.
I’ve heard said (on these forums even) that much of the problem with a music video channel is that there’s no “hook”. You don’t have any incentive to keep watching because you can always just turn back and get more videos later. Or, if you dislike the current video, you flip channels, get involved in the latest incarnation of CSI and don’t even think of coming back to the videos for the next hour.
As a result, it was extremely difficult to sell advertising time without a concrete demographic and numbers who’d be watching at a given time. At least with The Hills you know you have X many million females in the 14-25 demographic, etc etc.
There was one called The Tube that was broadcast on digital cable and over the air. We used to get here in the DC area and my wife and I loved it. We would have it on all the time, and since it was OTA it was free. They had limited commercials, and most of those were of the PSA kind. We were upset when they canceled the network. I wouldn’t have had a problem with more commercials at all really.
It was on here in Chicago, as well (it ran on WGN’s digital “second channel”), and Comcast carried it. I enjoyed watching it, but, as you noted, they pulled the plug on it (surprised to see in the Wikipedia article that it’s been two years now).
As with some of the other posters, I’m not convinced that a music video network would be “sticky” enough to keep people watching for long, esp. not when you can see your favorite artist’s videos on YouTube or iTunes.
Back in college I would always have MTVU on in the background because not only did they play music videos, but they usually played them before radio got their paws on it.
The only problem with that is you got some really really really weird and crappy music, mixed in with some cool new stuff.
They pretty much played music videos all of the time though, with some random college stuff thrown in.
I don’t see why a station showing videos couldn’t work. At some point videos lost the appeal that they had (which is why I assumed MTV got away from them) but artists are still making them. How expensive would it be to show them?
About 6 months or so ago, my wife and I found JBTV while channel surfing one Saturday night and we got to watch Eagles of Death Metal, Company of Theives, and a bunch of interviews at the SXSW Music festival. Since the digital conversion, we haven’t been able to watch it though.
There are far too many popular genres right now for a single “dumb” non-interactive channel to cover.
What I’d love is a smart channel like Pandora.com, where I could set up multiple personal stations and genres, and compatible videos would start playing.