VH1 Classics used to show nothing but videos without commercials. When I started seeing commercials every 15 minutes, I knew the end was near.
I never watched music videos until 1997, when we finally got a satellite dish (I was 15). Up until then we only had 4 channels, so I feel like there’s a lot I missed out on. Jaime regularly has to explain certain references to me. Anyway, I vividly recall watching MTV 2, and it was nothing but 24/7 music videos. And they had a lot of diversity.
Then the commercials started.
The commercials are always harbingers of doom.
I stopped watching videos around 2001 or 2002, after I graduated from high school, and I no longer knew any of the songs playing on VH1–they still played videos regularly until around 2003. I didn’t realize how much I missed watching videos until I went to Rome in 2005, and found out how great MTV Europe is.
I stopped watching videos around the time that every two-bit rapper decided that their video would be a “cinematic” experience, (shot in widescreen, credits etc.)
That being said, I watched Rage (An Australian Video Clips show designed for people who hate VJ’s) this morning with Mike Patton as the guest programmer. Now that was fun. (Though not as fun as the band T.I.S.M., who filled the first hour of their guest programmer spot with the theme music and opening credits of various current affairs shows.)
I stopped in the early-to-mid 90s… I got very bored. I missed the old “storytelling” videos artists used to come out with when the whole idea was new.
However, I have had my interest recently renewed by Feist and Scissor Sisters. Recently, as in, about a week ago. I would like to see more of these kinds of videos, and now I wonder what gems I may have been missing. Thank heavens for YouTube, indeed.
I like Air videos, too, usually. But I bought the DVD.
I’ll add my voice to the “When MTV stopped showing them” chorus.
I have a sixteen year old daughter, and my cable package includes MTV, MTV2, All the VH1s, AND Fuse, and you can’t be assured of finding a video on any of them at any given moment. We’re also not hiphop fans, so on the rare occasions that MTV does deign to play vidoes, they’re usually not anything we’re intersted in. We occasionally check out videos on On Demand, but it’s a pretty limited selection. My daughter has a few DVDs with her favorite bands’ videos on them.
While I’m here, I’d just like to mention that this:
Mostly because I don’t enjoy the music that accompanies them. They are two separate art forms that sometimes merge well, but often don’t. I have to wade through too much that I couldn’t care less about in order to get to one I enjoy.
I rather like Rage- they have the most random collection of Music Videos, and there’s an excellent chance that you’ll come across something completely new and awesome whilst watching.
Then again, there’s also an excellent chance that a lot of what you see will have Teh Suck, but I’ve found the “Cool Random Stuff” to “Teh Suck” ratio is pretty high with Rage.
That and ABC show all the BBC stuff that I like, so I really can’t stay mad at them (or SBS, for that matter).
I still watch them on TV every once in a while, but usually only if I happen to be flipping through channels and light on one of the MTV/VH1 variants that still shows them during times when I’m awake. Sometimes I’ll make an effort to catch VH1 Classic when it runs “We Are the 80s” or an old episode of Pop-Up Video. Logo has a weekly top ten viewer vote/countdown show that usually features LGBT artists and I try to catch that during one of its 30 or 40 airings per week. I get a couple of podcasts that include music videos sometimes and iTunes offers free videos every once in a while so I see those.
I don’t have the same level of hate that others do for the shift of MTV away from 24-hour videos, although I agree that they’ve swung too far into the pseudo-reality genre. I used to love Remote Control and The Real World and I thank MTV for putting great shows like The Young Ones on the air. If only people would get sick of crap like The Hills and Next.
It was circa 1999, right before I went off to graduate school, when I stopped. A couple of things happened around this time. 1) I didn’t have cable for awhile and 2)I stopped listening to contemporary music.
It used to be MTV2 used be all music videos and it was all the shit when I was in college. I’d just leave the TV tuned to this channel while I studied and did housechores. I was introduced to artists that I wouldn’t have normally been exposed to. It was great. But then the badness of MTV spilled into MTV2. Now it’s become too hard to find a good source of music videos.
They’re already dead. Once they cancelled “The Vault”, it was over.
I stopped watching new music videos when the original Headbanger’s Ball started drowning in hair metal and no-talent grunge. The “new” HB showed some promise (despite the lack of Riki Rachtman and the fact that nu-metal stinks) until MTV2 started displaying banner ads and pop-ups during every single video. Dammit, I have enough spyware on my computer, I don’t need any on my TV!
I think it was around the time the boy bands started kicking off. I don’t know if that was a direct reason as to why I stopped, but I do know that it’s nearly impossible to see any of them unless you’re up late at night or up early in the morning.
I disagree with the relationship between music videos and the songs themselves. When the videos are done well, it’s virtually impossible to distinguish the song from the video itself, or vice versa. I think that’s a good thing. I humbly submit Korn’s Freak On A Leash for your approval. I never liked the song, but I find the video impossible to divorce from the song itself. Because of that, whenever I see a part of the video or hear a snippet of the song, I immediately think of the other as well, and I think that’s part of the point.
Same here, basically. Mid 80’s. I’d still catch some of the latest videos if I were hanging out in a bar that played them, but I quit watching them on TV over twenty years ago. Don’t hang out in bars anymore. Couldn’t tell you what channel MTV or VH1 or anything like that on my TV is. I never bother with them. If my TV provider gives me the option of blocking unwanted channels, MTV and similar video “music” channels go into the same list as the shopping and religious channels.
Another reason is the videos seemed to all go to rap, hip-hop and the ever-so-generic top 40 soul pop sounds, none of which interest me at all. The only place you could see some of the more alternative music videos was in bars.
I’m from Toronto, where we had Chuck The Security Guard showing videos on Channel 47 all night, and “Toronto Rocks” on CITY-TV. My friend Brian has hordes of tapes he made of videos shown on that show by J.D. Roberts, whom you may know now as ex-CBS, now-CNN news anchor John Roberts. That concept was parlayed into its own channel, MuchMusic. Brian made hordes more tapes of videos shown there.
I didn’t have my own TV until 1991, and with my tax refund that year, I bought a hi-fi stereo VCR. I started taping videos and concerts. There were themed shows on MuchMusic, and artist profiles called “Spotlight” where they’d show 30 minutes of videos by one artist. Terry David Mulligan had a show called BackTrax, where he’d show really rare old videos for records when they were just “promotional films” that didn’t really have a place on TV to be shown. It appealed to the record collector in me - old records, with pictures! I started taping like mad.
Over the years, I amassed about three hundred tapes full of this stuff. Then in 1998 I left Canada and came down here to Florida. At last, I got to see the fabled MTV and VH1, but, as you folks have described, they didn’t show much in the way of music video anymore by then. That’s when I stopped watching videos - there’s no comparison between MTV and MuchMusic. I wasn’t around to see the birth of MuchMoreMusic. Do I understand that it’s already gone to crap, too?
I’m not crazy about watching tiny, grainy, pixellated, non-synchronized videos on YouTube. It’s just not the same.
By the way, I love the Australian “Rage” program. I had two tapes of Beatles and solo videos they showed on Rage, until I lent them to a guy, and I never saw them again.
It seems to have started its slide, from the fact I occasionally see ads for the OC on MMM when I’m watching City or Space, but I really only watched it for Listed (which I consider to be on-format), ClipTrip and Hit Me Baby One More Time when we had it, so I don’t know just how far along the slide it was at the time. It does still show ClipTrip, at least, but I only noticed that MMM was in the package on the day we left, and only managed to catch half of CT before leaving, so I don’t know if it’s a surviving exception or what.
ClipTrip is a MuchMoreMusic original show (so it’s not a surprise you wouldn’t have caught it as an American), which shows music videos from around the world, including some less mainstreamy Canadian artists. The programmers (and fans who make requests) seem very fond of K’Naan, Molotov, Juanes, M.I.A., J-Pop in general (but less any specific artists) and an Inuit duo whose name I can never remember. They also occasionally play artists I don’t think need playing on ClipTrip, because they get plenty of play on Much and/or MuchMore anyway - the British episode included Sting, the Latin episode included Shakira, and Bjork was played fairly often - but they play a lot of good music that they wouldn’t have played otherwise, so I wasn’t going to complain. (I did complain about the month where they seemed to have fallen in love with Gasolina. That damned song still gets stuck in my head randomly.)
