MTV blames Internet piracy for its demise as a music channel into reality TV FUD

http://aroundthe.net/random-wtf/mtv-destroyed-by-piracy/

by sylviebarak • 15 years ago

23 21 15 years ago

Bandrik• 15 years ago

"Wait, the M stood for Music?" -Any member of today's youth

I used to love MTV back in the 90's. Beavis and Butt-Head, Daria, Celebrity Deathmatch, and of course... music videos. I would stay up till 1am just watching the random music videos they had. I also remember watching commercials for Final Fantasy VII and Oddworld. I miss the 90's.. =/

ugh• 15 years ago

Believe it or not, I actually used MTV (Germany) to discover music from 1998 (when I was ten) to maybe 2002 (when I was 14). That used to actually be possible.

The music I discovered isn’t even bad and withstood the test of time remarkably well. (Of the top of my head I’m thinking of all the Discovery singles by Daft Punk, the first Gorillaz video Clint Eastwood and the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s Californication.) And Celebrity Deathmatch was awesome.

chopsueyar2• 15 years ago

What about 'The Head'?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Head

jokermatt999• 15 years ago

Even worse, TLC was once The Learning Channel.

leeskye• 15 years ago

The Internet killed the Music Video star

pyre• 15 years ago

That just doesn't roll of the tongue in the same way.

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

The Limousines beg to differ: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zx5tSmOY_iM

gaak99• 15 years ago

In my mind and in my car we can't rewind we've come too far.

Natsu2• 15 years ago

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the music industry screwed itself by raising rates until they all but killed the most profitable, popular and legit outlet they had?

But the natural reaction to piracy seems to be to screw one's paying customers, if the events of the past 20 or so years are any indication.

rick888• 15 years ago

"Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that the music industry screwed itself by raising rates until they all but killed the most profitable, popular and legit outlet they had?"

This may be the case. But, I don't believe that people pirating music ever wanted to actually buy the music. You can now get 99 cent songs without DRM and there are tons of services like Pandora, Grooveshark, and Last.fm (where you can preview entire songs before buying). Both of these were points brought up as a reason for piracy around the time of Napster. Piracy is still worse than ever.

I'm still waiting for the new set of excuses.

Natsu2• 15 years ago

You get punished for being an honest customer.

I bought a game a while back. It refused to install because of some broken StarForce DRM. Sure, I should've researched the game first to avoid that notoriously bad DRM, but it was an impulse buy. That's another way they're killing themselves; it's a real pain to have to research everything instead of buying whatever looks fun.

Alas, the only good brands I know of these days are PopCap and GoodOldGames, which are great, but that really limits what you can buy.

So I wasted a lot of time for nothing by trying to pay the artists. And no, I didn't pirate the damn game even though I should've been entitled to, I just wasted a ton of time.

Punish people like that enough and you won't have any customers left. People respond in kind. They don't care about your beef with the pirates, but they do care about getting hurt in the crossfire.

ianferrel• 15 years ago

>Napster had cast its stone straight into the music goliath’s eye, and no one had seen it coming.

>MTV was forced to react, and fast. The network realized that the cheapest way to operate was to start producing its own content, rather than fork out the oodles of cash needed for a half decent music channel. And thus, hits like “Punked,” “Pimp my Ride,” “Singled Out” and more recently “Teen mom” and “Jersey Shore” were born.

That was some serious foresight, running Singled Out from 1995 to 1998, in response to Napster, released in 1999.

chopsueyar2• 15 years ago

Even more foresight, "The State"... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_%28TV_series%29

No mention of MTV2, either. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV2

redthrowaway• 15 years ago

The release of Snooki's book caused so great a disruption to the universe that a closed timelike curve formed in spacetime, preserving causality relative to any reference point within it but causing such seeming paradoxes as cause preceding effect when observed from a separate worldline. Thus MTV's flight from music in the 90s was in response to the rising prominence of Vevo.

phamilton• 15 years ago

How did napster affect music videos any more than radio does? Listening to music is very different from watching music videos.

jonburs• 15 years ago

Napster allowed you to choose what music to listen to (and when and where you wanted to listen to it). On the radio (and MTV, when they actually played videos) the choices were made for you.

Kind of like network / cable TV -> DVRs, Hulu, Netflix streaming...

andresmh• 15 years ago

so people are willing to pirate music but not reality TV shows?

adrianb• 15 years ago

They thought about that, and so they made sure that the reality shows were really crappy.

arn• 15 years ago

The timing of this is way way off. MTV stopped being a music station well before internet piracy. And over a decade before YouTube.

uxp• 15 years ago

Does anyone have the canonical source of MTV claiming that internet piracy contributed to its demise? This entire article seems contrived and made up, with dates and times completely missing the mark.

Singled out stopped airing in 1998, where Napster was released in 1999. Wikipedia says that the shows "Total request" and "MTV: Live", which were shows that did center around music videos, were created specifically because critics complained that MTV was not playing enough Music Videos, in 1997.

Despite targeted efforts to play certain types of music videos in limited rotation, MTV greatly reduced its overall rotation of music videos throughout the first decade of the 2000s. While music videos were featured on MTV up to eight hours per day in 2000, 2008 saw an average of just three hours of music videos per day on MTV.[1]

So, Youtube started to have influence on how people watched music videos half a decade prior to it's launch in 2005? Someone should have done a bit more research in writing this article than the 10 minutes I just spent trying to confirm everything they said.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTV

te_chris• 15 years ago

So...they couldn't afford to play music videos BUT they could afford all the money it would've cost in production of thousands of hours of tv and all the costs involved? Seems like a bit of revisionism is going on here...

MTV blames Internet piracy for its demise as a music channel into reality TV FUD

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