MTV VHS Recordings 1981 to 1989 [video] | Hacker News Reader

MTV VHS Recordings 1981 to 1989 [video]

archive.org

138 pointsshervinafshar40 comments

I am old enough to have watched the first few hours. The cable came into a box on the TV. I think it was a 25 inch tube as my Dad liked to watch the NFL games. The cable box was a dial with ~60 channels on it and a A/B switch (so there was channel 60A and channel 60B). The TV had a remote but of course that did not work with the cable box so my job as the kid was to change the channel when my parents asked!

There was not a ton of videos so they replayed them a ton. I remember seeing The Buggles, Go-go’s, Toto, Prince, etc. A lot of the videos where just the band on stage playing with various camera views. I also remember watching the premiere of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983) with my parents. It was pretty cool.

I remember there were no 'alternative' radio stations around me at the time, so I looked forward to every Sunday night to watch and listen to MTV's 120 minutes to hear all the new stuff (or new to me anyway). Thanks for sharing these.

Yeah, I loved 120 Minutes. I miss these little gems that would pop into my life unexpectedly. That was one of the joys of radio in the 80s, too, before it all became corporatized. So many small programs on small radio stations at random times of the day or night.

When I was a kid, we would often make the 8-hour trip from our home to my grandparents home a few states over. I would bring my cheap-o Walkman ripoff and just go up and down the dial as we drove looking for something interesting to listen to. I'd find some cool station in some moderately sized town we were driving through and listen for 30 or 60 minutes until we were out of range, then start hunting again. I'd hear all kinds of things: pop (of course), reggae, Gregorian chants, punk, metal, gospel, afro-pop, you name it! So much fun. Kind of like the Internet in the early to mid 90s. It was a great way to discover stuff that isn't really matched by all the algorithms and funneling that goes on today.

Dave Kendall (one of the host of 120 Minutes) does a show every Friday on XM First Wave on Friday nights - Party 360 with Dave Kendall. There is also Dark Wave on Sundays. Between those 2 it covers anything you would have heard on 120 Minutes.

Our modern era of algorithmic music programming (or the "four hour playlist" format) makes be pine for the days when actual humans did music programming. SiriusXM has a lot of stations with really good on-air talent. Not sure how much leeway they have on what actually gets played, but they're at least knowledgeable. Some college radio stations are also really good. (Shout-out to John Richards at KEXP!)

This collection has 8 videos from 1990 and 3 from 1991. There is a few others from MTV's 90s on other collections at archive.arg: https://archive.org/details/movies?sin=&and%5B%5D=MTV&and%5B...

Does anyone know where to buy good quality music videos from the 1980s?

Currently some are available on YouTube, some on iTunes, some nowhere. Quality is very hit-and-miss.

Why doesn't Apple have all of these for sale? Is it an issue of rights? Do they think there wouldn't be enough demand? Is there is a lot already available in torrents and that would compete with iTunes?

Why do you want to purchase a music video??? Do you run a TV station and will re-broadcast it, or some other broadcasting strategy?

Why not? In college (mid-2000s), I downloaded hundreds of music videos from the '80s and '90s on Limewire. This was before they were posted online on Youtube, many of which are clearly TV rips, as they feature the TV channel's logo in the corner.

These make up an important part of music history. Youtube will not be around forever, and many of these videos will one day disappear, just like many websites of yore have.

why would it be for rebroadcast purposes? not OP but I want to have such things streamed to my TV in my own home.

Because music videos are free.

I would pay money for original media because the data will likely be in it's "best" original encoding, metadata etc. And nobody other than the studio has meddled with it. You don't get that using youtube-dl or torrenting formats other people provide.

edit: Music production evolves over time and digital content distribution is very different in the mixing business. Older formats are not built with streaming in mind and so you lose a lot of quality during upload to streaming services: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHxMsawJsTc

Thank you for explaining. Many videos on YouTube are low quality.

Also, if I buy it I expect that some decent percentage of my purchase price makes it back to the original artist. (I know, very naïve of me). If I get it off youtube then the artist might get just a fraction of a cent in the best case.

I've heard that MTV caused new fashions to become popular outside big cities first, because rural areas were more likely to have cable TV in the 1980s.

Well, urban centers had a choice of over-the-air (OTA) TV and FM broadcast signals. So suburban areas may have adopted cable faster because they had less choices.

For those too young to have experienced OTA, the TV signal was crisper (no bleed) than cable. FM is actually CD-quality if you're in a major city and have a $1000 receiver.

Not rural, but suburban or smaller cities- dense enough to make financial sense, but without the costs of urban excavation.

I prefer the commercials are left in.

Getting:

This video file cannot be played. (Error Code: 224003)

On all the videos, tried Safari and Chrome.

archive encodes these files upon upload. you can click the torrent link and download the files it's only ~9GB. consider seeding it for a day or 2 so others can access it quickly too.

Any idea if the torrent might get updated to more than 5 of the files contained? I was quite disappointed after grabbing it.

All of the links on the site are now broken with the message "The item is not available due to issues with the item's content."

Was the content taken down because of copyright issues?

Not a single video of Adam Curry's magnificent 80s hairdo? It's a bleedin' outrage!

How can the uploader claim public domain for that?

Archive is classified as a library in the United States, as far as I understand it.

They put a public domain tag on the content, which is different than the library exception.

Can you access these through torrents?

Yes. In the "Download Options" sidebar there is a link to the torrent manifesto file.

Every torrent I've gotten off archive.org has just been links to the http seed file and no trackers.

I see only 5 actual files in the torrent that are mp4. It's far from a complete torrent. I really would love a full copy of all of this.

Really really good proramming.

Totally Rad!

Back when music videos were awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art:

Dire Straits - Money For Nothing (complete with CG and 80's pastel graphics on live video) - https://youtu.be/csje_Tb0U0c

Here's a playlist of 80's MTV videos, starting with the Space Shuttle and Apollo launches followed by landing the MTV flag on the moon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBhuf1g-rY&list=PLDHCLXs2vT...

Like most things on Internet Archive, individual videos are not annotated very well so you have no idea what's in the content. Digging through it would be, sadly, mostly a waste of time. It would be more useful with annotations.

> Back when music videos were awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art

They still are, but the mainstream eclipses everything and the noise level is much higher.

I have a music 'tv' dedicated to these videos: https://humanmusic.tv/

this is interesting, don't you think music videos were good also after the '80s?

In my very modest opinion they peaked somewhere in the '90s: basically everything by Michel Gondry until "Let Forever Be"[0] is awesome and some artists (Prodigy, Bjork, Fatboy Slim, Korn, Marylin Manson) have made their clips almost as recognizable as their music.

It seems these days they have become fairly boring but then again, maybe I've just become older and uncool.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FyfQDO5g0

I think you're right, but there's always the element that the older crowd gravitate towards what we grew up with. And everyone eventually becomes the older crowd.

There would be some people on here for which even this stuff is too "young"; those who grew up with 50's, 60's and 70's music of course.

Music videos are still awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art. Videos like APESHIT from The Carters, Lady Gaga's Telephone, Childish Gambino's This is America, and pretty much anything from OK Go have been at least equal to the best videos made from that era.

It's not fair for a lens of nostalgia to mean you're comparing the best videos of an era to an average video from a current one.

Very true. Watching the first 4 hours of MTV had quite a few snoozers TBH. There are still great things being made and if we are willing to cherry pick there have been great things made in every musical era.

Back when music videos were awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art

IMO some recent videos are still "awesome". I hesitate to mention the recent Big Boi Chocolate video (it's much different than 1980s videos) but I really enjoyed it. The visuals were great, but probably too risque for many people. I got there from the Lucifer TV series.

It's an example of what I'm complaining about when I say I can't buy videos. I can find it on YouTube, but not on iTunes. I guess the label doesn't want to monetize it, simply considers it a promo?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8VZ52fWYnQ

> videos were awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art

I don't know if we are looking at the same thing or I'm too young to feel nostalgic about it but what I'm seeing looks like 95% complete trash.

music videos are like the one medium that barely evolved over the decades. and why bother? enough people are content with boiler-plate booty-shaking or simply showing the band playing.

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