Pretty much.
Did VH-1 abandon everything as well?
But that’s true of pretty much all content. Why is it any more true of music videos than of anything else? If anything, I’d expect music videos to have a greater market for a TV channel, because in the YouTube format, every item of content is only a couple of minutes long, and every one has an ad at the beginning, so you end up with an extremely high ratio of ads to content.
What a weird claim? Do you watch much on YouTube? I watch a lot of live music videos and some howto videos and nearly all of them are significantly longer than two minutes. Google AI claims that the average YouTube video length is around twelve minutes long and the average music video is close to seven minutes long. That tracks with my usage. I doubt that there are enough super long videos to throw off the average from the median.
What music videos are you watching, that the average is seven minutes? For comparison, on a much-discussed recent album, Swift’s Life of a Showgirl, the tracks range from 2:30 to 4:06. Even a long song like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” is still less than six minutes.
Entirely live music. Either concert footage or stuff like Tiny Desk which probably explains the difference.
Then they would just be copying what VH1 did four decades ago.
Of course, you can do that with failout videos, old television shows that nobody cares about protecting, and all news content and home improvement tips. So…what is the business case for cable television beyond local live sports and public access?
Despite being squarely of the ‘MTV Generation’ I was never a frequent viewer because we didn’t have cable television feed, and even when I did see it irregularly, I was largely perplexed at the popularity of it. Most videos of that era were not particularly inspired or had any real narrative (the Genesis “Land of Confusion” video made by Spitting Image was one of the few exceptions) but frankly I’m not sure the world really needed more than the first twelve minutes of MTV.
Stranger
I watch a ton of YouTube, so much so that i pay for a non-ad version. Mostly I watch free movies, and young reactors watching movies and TV shows I love.
I’m 67, and I’m very familiar with Ridiculousness! It’s something to have on in the background while doing chores around the house. It can be pretty funny!
I’ve seen it a few times. Can be funny, but mostly cringy. Yeah, the giggling blond is very annoying.
Yes, I didn’t know MTV was still a thing.
I just checked Wikipedia and learned “MTV is an American cable television channel and the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group.” And I was thinking that if MTV is the flagship, it’s got to really suck to be one of the other channels in that group.
I mean, if you listen to the lyrics of Dire Straits “Money for Nothing”, arguably the signature song for MTV (even though it is subtly mocking both the channels and viewers, as well as musicians pandering to them, and Mark Knopfler himself was pretty stridently opposed to making videos) it has not aged well, or perhaps it presciently looked forward into the future of “music television” and entertainment in general and saw the gaping void of commercialism sucking every bit of creativity out of the marrow of music and replacing it with corporatized slop. That MTV became the “discount reality television channel” that people put on in the background is totally obvious in hindsight.
Stranger
They couldn’t afford Bob Sagat.
(The would have to let him say “shit” and “pussy” anyways.)
Remember years ago there was a cable station (like 74 or something when that was as high as they went) that showed classic arts stuff - Classic Arts Showcase. Ballet performances, opera scenes/arias, etc., I used to LOVE that. If I were ever to have a TV on in the background for noise, that would have been it.
ETA: omg, it’s still around, online and METV https://www.classicartsshowcase.org/
I’m pretty certain the same channel has shows about parking meter maids and storage locker auctions and super fat people now.
METV may, but the actual Classic Arts Showcase website is streaming the same content it always did.
As I understand it (in other words, I’m not looking for a cite right now), a substantial part of the reason why MTV moved off videos as their primary programming was because advertisers disliked how music videos weren’t “sticky”. When you’re watching a traditional show, you want to know what’s going to happen so you’ll sit through the commercials to find out. When you’re watching videos, you’re not as invested and don’t even know if the next video will interest you so you’re more likely to change channels during the commercials without fear of missing the show if you don’t go back soon enough. So MTV slowly started shifting to more traditional half-hour programming because it was easier to find advertisers for those time blocks.
This probably matters less on YouTube where you’re selecting and watching videos more deliberately and more likely to sit through an ad roll because you expressly wanted to see the video afterwards.
At the same time as Youtube was gaining popularity every single video was turning into a different version of “douchebags at a club”, which made MTV absolutely pointless to watch. There used to be music videos worth watching, they died long before MTV started showing fail compilations.
I think MTV read the writing on the wall long before YouTube came around. They started dabbling with original programming in the 1980s, I remember the game show Remote Control the most, starting in the 1990s and continuing into the 2000s, they really started shifting away from music videos to regular television programs. It just happened so gradually a lot of us didn’t really notice it.
I know I miss the classic MTV but the truth is I certainly wasn’t watching it as much in 1994 as I had been in 1989. The MTV I knew and loved really only lasted for 14 or 15 years.
I heard that MTV is planning to shut down at the end of the year. That’s not entirely correct; the main channel will stay on the air, but 5 spinoff channels will stop broadcasting.
One wonders how often their (Classic Arts Showcase) website is updated. My local cable system carried it on a public access channel run by a local college, until about 3 years ago, but it’s still listed there. The signal deteriorated in quality over several months, and finally disappeared completely. In the meantime, I got digital TV.
I know a woman who has worked in satellite communications, and when I told her about that, she said she had wondered what those giant satellite dishes were doing on one particular building.
Last time I checked, VH-1 primarily aired reality shows and 90s/00s movies that featured black actors.