MTV Shutting Down Some of Its Music Channels After 40 Years

I was at a Motley Crue concert about 1996 or so, during the "Corabi Crue" era, and John Corabi at one point says "I used to think MTV stood for Music Television. Now I realize it stands for Moron Television." I LOL'd.

I'm glad I had the chance to watch MTV anonymously rather than be surveilled by Google and hundreds of its partners and grand-partners.

Also glad I listened to full songs and not 60 second clips in the background of tiktoks.

As an old millennial whose source of new music is now Tiktok, I disagree there are better ways to get new music. The concept of a 24/7 music video channel exposed me to all kinds of music in the '90s and early '00s that I would have simply skipped over if it played on the radio, or came up on Spotify (unsubscribed years ago).

Part of the reason AI bands can rack up millions of listens on streaming platforms is because real bands are largely anonymous outside of the tiny album art thumbnail. To learn about them, you have to follow them on a separate social media platform. On MTV, there would be shows that interviewed bands before premiering their video, or had programs like like Pop-up Video that showed band trivia underneath the music video. I discovered Beck while watching the Pop Up video for "The New Pollution".

The visual identity of a band or artist presented through the music video was key to introducing new sounds to me. The music video now is dead for all but the largest, best known artists, and their videos are predictable fodder made only to distribute on Youtube.

I genuinely miss it a lot... that and decent radio coverage. Phoenix had a few great stations that had not just the mainstream music but a lot of indie and smaller/local artists played. You just don't get much of that in the algorithmically generated content playlists today.

The song that started it all. For a few years straight TRL was the show to catch. MTV brought classics such as Bevis and Butthead, and Daria. I probably missed a half dozen other influential MTV programs.

Same... MTV went full on with reality TV and other programming, then there was M2 and VH1, both of which followed. I had no idea they even had other stations with actual music videos anymore.

Aside: I HATE the Android TV experience for trying to listen to music or watching music videos from YouTube Music. The phone app is significantly better, but still not what I would consider good. We really need more/better options for semi-curated music at this point... all the algorithmic choices just keep getting worse IMO.