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Comment by listenallyall | Hacker News Reader

The whole concept of music as a visual medium is rather limiting. MTV was fucking awesome for little while, then it became entirely routine with maybe one cool new video every couple of months, then it became pretty boring, then it simply stopped showing videos because nobody cared anymore.

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There’s an interesting case study here. Most Indian pop music comes from movies so nearly every popular song comes with a music video at no cost. It would be interesting to see what the breakdown of people who watch the music videos vs only listen to audio is.

Is that really down to the medium? I thought rights issues of music videos meant they preferred cheap content they totally owned. I.e. Beavis and Butthead couldn't release complete DVDs with videos implying MTV was excluded from revenue streams until they made non-music video shows.

What could be cheaper than broadcasting content that other people produced, at zero cost to you? Problem is, just showing videos back to back like a radio station doesn't equal ratings, and no ratings means no advertising revenue.

They were addicted to the big budget videos and glorifying production costs at a time when special effects were still very expensive, but the benefit to doing that was inherently dropping since any artist that could expect millions more in increasingly cheaper CD sales had alternatives to an expensive Ad/giveaway.

That doesn't answer any question for me of whether the video medium was good or bad, clearly MTV's monopoly meant the only way to release videos was an economical disaster.

Does MTV still show music?

I would expect a smaller repertoire considering audiovisual production is a lot more expensive than just audio.

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