Review: Why Did MTV Stop Playing Music?

Former VJ Dave Holmes explores the channel's history on his podcast, Who Killed the Video Star.

It's one of pop culture's great questions: Why did MTV, a cable network literally called "Music Television," stop playing music?

Written and hosted by Dave Holmes—himself a former MTV host—the podcast Who Killed the Video Star? offers an answer. As Holmes demonstrates, what took the M out of MTV was largely supply and demand.

When MTV premiered in 1981, music videos were a novelty; a network that played them 24/7 appealed even to cynical Gen Xers. But the format wasn't conducive to setting competitive ad rates: The entire programming lineup was identical—a random music video, then another one—and viewers could change the channel when a song ended if they didn't like the one that came on next.

"MTV doesn't play music anymore" is a complaint nearly as old as the network itself, as executives embraced more conventional programming to keep viewers engaged for longer than three minutes at a time. The advent of YouTube put virtually every music video in history at your fingertips, making MTV—so radically inventive just a generation earlier—as obsolete as FM radio.

Where it once showed only music videos, MTV now airs almost nothing but unscripted shows about internet videos. The reason, as the podcast finds, is simple: because that's what people will watch.

Comments

[Medulla Oblongata]

When I'm working from home on a Tuesday, my TV gets set to MTVclassic for the 80s block in the morning and the rock block in the afternoon. Other than that, MTV, MTVc, VH1 are never getting my views. Otherwise, I'm listening to FM radio as the background.

Living way out in EBF, my internet bandwidth isn't good, so streaming videos or music chews it up.

[MasterThief]

Spotify probably would serve you better even with spotty internet. Download a few playlists in low quality (still better than radio) and cycle through a few hundred songs throughout the day.

[Medulla Oblongata]

I have about 1000 CDs in my basement that I ripped to FLAC and converted to MP3, plus a few hundred vinyl albums that have been MP3-ized via a USB turntable I bought for the process (that was tedious, I can tell you...). I've got playlists from those and can play them off my media server anywhere in the house, and have large curated blocks of music on my phone and iPad from that collection. I'm not hurting for music.

I like the radio, what can I say? I get snippets of local and national news, morning shows give some punch lines, weather reports... My local station is a "play anything" station, which seems to align with my tastes from 70's - ~2000 (when my musical chops were being formed). I can go to the barn and turn on the radio there. I can turn on the radio in the UTV when I'm working outside. Sure, there's commercials, but not so many I find it troublesome, and some are catchy.

[Dillinger]

120 Minutes still rocks.

[AT]

Do people even watch things on televisions anymore? I swear that's the most obsolete tech in my house.

[MasterThief]

Nothing about the state of music and how much they limited themselves to a record industry curation of 20 pop or hip hop songs on rotation. Back in the late 90s to early 2000s you could flip between mtv and vh1 and have a decent chance to see both playing the same video.
If you liked rock, country, or just finding new artists 1⁰ off the mainstream then you were out of luck on mtv. The one show I enjoyed was headbangers ball, but even there they utilized a small playlist.
While I understand that the channel's target audience has always been dumb teens, they went all in on appealing to brainless teen girls with cheesy dramas and dance music that sll sounds the same.
This is a short article, but it's lame that it only blames lazy producers and people obsessing over Real World. What really killed the M in MTV was probably youtube. There was a plethora of cinematic, story-driven videos that you could watch from a wide variety of artists with no commercials and constant choices. If you want a libertarian answer for why MTV failed, it is because emerging platforms better served their core products to a diverse audience.

[tracerv]

120 Minutes introduced me to a lot of alternative music I never would have heard in Nashville TN on the radio. Maybe the Vandy college station but that was it.

Liquid Television was also awesome.

[MasterThief]

Internet options like lastfm started really opening me up to all sorts of stuff that would otherwise be hard to find. There's a lot of good music out there, but the stuff being shoved down the public's throat in mainstream is awful.

[tracerv]

We didn't have the internet in 1985. We had to work for our music and porn! :}

[JFree]

MTV itself was one of three things imo that killed music.

The video format reduced the value of bands focusing on music. Increased the value of a pretty face fronting the band and of movie type creation skills

The synthesizer and autotune reduced the value of musicians having to become skilled at playing instruments on which to compose songs.

Streaming killed the business and thus mostly killed the dream of getting groupies by playing music.

[Mickey Rat]

MTV has shows that are more conducive to ad revenue, but is it culturally relevant to anything anymore?

[arpiniant1]

The original MTV was ads for music interspersed with ads
brilliant, why could they not get ad rates?

[Spiritus Mundi]

as obsolete as FM radio.

Maybe AM radio?

[Dillinger]

best thing on MTv was Remote Control

[EISTAU Gree-Vance]

Beavis and Butthead. Saw (parts of) so many obscure videos that I woulda never seen otherwise.

At first I thought the show was just cheerleading the MTV product (videos) but then I noticed they were totally trashing all the glam bands and pop singers that I hated. And the commentary was much more clever than most people give it credit for.

[Zeb]

It was a thing for a certain time. I was certainly complaining about the shift away from mostly showing music videos in the 90s. But in the youtube era it's pretty irrelevant.