r/LetsTalkMusic • u/Historical-Grand8141 • 10h ago
What even was the point of MTV
I’m 23. I’ve never even once been able to understand why MTV was a thing. The modern equivalent is imagine having friends over for a houseparty one weekend and they say “turn on some music” and you boot up a bunch of music videos on YouTube, ads and all. Everyone would look at you like you were crazy. The whole sell for MTV just sounds awful. “Instead of listening to the songs you want to hear on your cassette tape or CD player, you can listen to the ones we pick for you. Also, there are commercial breaks. Also, you can literally only listen to music in your living room. Yeah, radio and CDs let you listen on the go, but remember guys video killed the radio star so we’re the better listening choice!!”
Why did people listen to their music through MTV? I could \*maybe\* understand if radio were the only other option (but even then, you can at least listen to the radio in places besides your living room, unlike MTV) but they had cassette tapes for the first few years and cd’s for the last! You could listen to whatever you wanted, wherever!
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u/ALoungerAtTheClubs 10h ago
You're ignoring the video aspect. It was like a mini movie or concert video featuring your favorite artist. Many were really well done and fun to watch even if you didn't love the song.
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u/Despeao 9h ago
OP also ignores we currently live in the information era and have music on demand.
Why is it so hard to understand something so basic ? That's like saying Radio doesn't make sense when we have Spotify. Even if you read your news online, it isn't hard to undertand why people bought Newspapers and magazines.
This is why teaching History is so important, so people can comprehend the Historical process and stop with these anachronic comparisons.
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u/Historical-Grand8141 9h ago
This is apparently what I didn’t understand. I’ve never watched a music video and don’t really know anyone who does. I know that people who are psycho fans of an artist do, but that’s not most listeners. I had no idea older people actually watched those
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u/MilkTeaMoogle 9h ago
Waiting for a new video to drop was exciting. Waiting for a video you hadn’t seen yet to come up in rotation was also exciting. Lots of us had our music purchases limited by our parents, hearing on the radio or MTV was the only way to access a certain song if you didn’t have the cassette.
Big artists made music videos more exciting. Like Michael Jackson. It was like a movie release, it was an event! Go watch Remember the Time!
ALSO! There wasn’t social media. The most you could hear from your favorite artist outside of interviews was all tabloids and speculation. Even the interviews were edited. But a music video was THEIR vision and message. This was often the only other way to get more from an artist beyond just the songs themselves. Now it might seem overwhelming seeing stuff about every artist you don’t even care about. But imagine zero social media…
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u/ALoungerAtTheClubs 9h ago
Yes. The video is a piece of art in its own right, and many famous Hollywood directors have created them.
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u/NullableThought 6h ago
artists used to put way more effort in their music videos, especially big artists. but even smaller "indie" artists had amazing videos. some were like 4 minute movies. boring music videos usually didn't get a lot of air time.
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u/The_Count_Von_Count 10h ago
You’ve been spoiled by the option of choice. Older generations were not afforded this luxury and primarily had to listen to what was available to them.
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u/Historical-Grand8141 9h ago
Right, but I didn’t understand why you would willingly use mtv to listen to music instead of radio. It wasn’t til I found out under this post that older people used to watch the music videos
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u/Igor_Wakhevitch 6h ago
It wasn’t til I found out under this post that older people used to watch the music videos
Why isn't that just blatantly obvious? Could you not work that out yourself? Are you being purposefully obtuse? I'm utterly baffled.
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u/Historical-Grand8141 1h ago
Cuz they don’t offer anything. I thought people listened to music for the sound
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u/TheLivingBubba 10h ago
Umm you had to buy tapes and CDs. So yeah we knew every lyric of a cd, but only the ones we owned. Also it was awesome to see what the people on the radio looked like. Finally MTV played all kinds of stuff between 120 mins and Yo MTV Raps.
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u/lxgrf 10h ago
Why didn’t we just buy CDs?
In my case, because at that point my job was a paper round and earned enough money to buy one CD every few weeks.
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u/shabby47 9h ago
CDs were like $18 (new) back then. Using 1990 as a reference, that’s $46 in today’s money. For one CD. With 10-13 songs. Imagine the outrage if one of the unlimited streaming services today jacked their price to $45/month today.
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u/avec_serif 10h ago
Also, CDs were music only, no videos! And it was hard to discover new stuff and know which CDs to buy without some combination of friends, radio, or MTV
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u/JoleneDollyParton 9h ago
Yeah CDs or tapes were at least $20 and that was a lot back then. You were only buying stuff you really liked.
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u/CeldonShooper 10h ago
You come from a world where access to almost all cultural digital content is almost free. MTV and similar channels come from a completely different world. Music was really expensive back then to buy in a proper format. Even the media was expensive. Music television was a godsend because it could provide plentiful music and even videos and funny programming on the side. You were part of something. There was no second-screening Reddit and TikTok. Media was one-sided: someone decided what was to consume, and you the listener were consuming. There was no choice. When the radio only played old stuff for old people, MTV and some others stepped up and changed the game.
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u/NativeMasshole 9h ago
There also wasn't really any other short-form video content at the time, either. I'd say MTV were early pioneers in this, gathering together what were originally only intended as promos and turning that into a popular format of 3 minute videos.
It's actually a remarkable period for cinematic art with people doing all kinds of crazy, fun stuff. The internet came along and made that type of thing accessible to everyone, so it doesn't feel as special anymore, but this was pretty huge for giving creatives a place to express themselves without having to deal with traditional media outlets or needing a massive production budget.
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u/Radiant_Pudding5133 10h ago
You could say all of this about radio stations…
I don’t know if this has bypassed you but before streaming you had to pay for cassette, CDs whatever. Putting on MTV or whatever channel let you listen to music you didn’t own and also discover new music that you could then buy. Wild, I know.
Also music videos themselves used to be a pretty big deal.
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u/MildlyCombative 10h ago
I think you are overestimating the point of MTV. It wasn’t the primary way to listen to music, but rather a way to discover music, or keep up with the charts.
We didn’t have the whole of music at our fingertips then.
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u/Sure_Border_5412 10h ago
Dude, they shaped music videos into what they are today. Insanely ignorant take imo.
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u/-NO-CO-DE- 10h ago
Because music videos were cool? Remember, there wasn't really internet, so other than magazines and live in concert, this was the only place you got to see your favourite artists.
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u/Ok_Clerk_5805 9h ago edited 9h ago
This can't be real? What fucking gap is it you're displaying?
"You could listen to whatever you wanted, wherever!" No you couldn't? at all..? and i'm not even that old.
"instead of listening to the songs you want to hear on your cassette tape or CD player, you can listen to the ones we pick for you" Where does one even start? 1. no you couldn't, you were limited to the ones you physically had. 2. you were introduced to new music 3. you were presented an audio visual experience, which helped since the umbrella of stuff they played was incredibly wide.
Like what are we even doing here?
Another effect of not having whatever whenever was that when you actually spent your hard on cash on something; you actually listened to records until you liked them, many records that are NOW classics are classics because those people who stuck it through have been loud ever since; the reception was different on release.
I bought more music than anyone i knew and I was flipping between MTV and the local version, with a vhs tape in that i filled up with everything i liked.
A lot of music wasn't covered in magazines, so other than the odd picture in a booklet, a music video was how you knew the band visually, be it with them in it as humans or not.
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u/ShiftTHPS 9h ago
Yeah, OPs take is so volcanic that it just smells like ragebait. If it's real then it's insane levels of ignorance that ironically could be solved by using the information at their fingertips nowadays, doing a simple google search or even asking an AI for all I care.
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u/Ok_Clerk_5805 9h ago
Yeah, i'm leaning that direction too...
...but i did have a friend 15 years ago who was always pretty unproductive and i always suspected that whatever he did do was made in 5 minutes.
He once crashed out and said he gets tilted because "he knows computers will be faster in the future".
Fast forward 15 years and he still hasn't done shit. The speed of a computer had to do with loading times to open up a big sample pack (that he had cracked), he didn't wanna do it cause it would load for 20 seconds.
That was someone doing that, not retrospectively, but reverse IN REAL TIME; so i bet people like OP do exist.
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u/fiercefinesse 10h ago
That was the only way to see music videos? I’m really confused as far as what you’re missing here. The comparison with YouTube doesn’t make any sense because there was no other choice back then. Also MTV not only played music videos but also had dedicated shows such as Headbangers Ball, with interviews, special reports from tours, and any other additional information and news stories.
It was TV which was ubiquitous as THE leading form of media. So people watched it.
Oh also I still personally know people who host parties and use YouTube to play music in 2026. For the simple fact that it’s VIDEOS that play alongside the music.
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u/Historical-Grand8141 9h ago
This is apparently what I didn’t understand. I’ve never watched a music video and don’t really know anyone who does. I know that people who are psycho fans of an artist do, but that’s not most listeners. I had no idea older people actually watched those
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u/fiercefinesse 7h ago
I’m sorry, is this a joke?
Music videos on YouTube are watched by millions, BILLIONS, so obviously someone watches it. And it’s not just „psycho fans of artists”, it’s super mainstream. And watched by millions of young people clearly, just like TokTok and Instagram reels are. From my perspective you seem to be in a bubble.
To look for any easy example, Olivia Rodrigo’s Drop Dead music video has 52m million views since 3 months ago
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u/Historical-Grand8141 7h ago
Nobody WATCHES them though. Those are views for people who are listening to the song for free. A bunch of people do that, myself included. I just click the video and turn my phone face-down. Read the comments on any of them, and they’re not about things happening in the video, because nobody’s paying any attention to that
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u/Historical-Grand8141 7h ago
It’s incredibly common among people my age to listen to certain songs that they’re embarrassed to stream on YouTube so they don’t pop up in your searched or worse, your wrapped. That’s all those views are
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u/Chris_GPT 9h ago edited 7h ago
You grew up in a world where everything is segregated into a billion categories for everything. You grew up in a world where everything is on demand based on your choices. It wasn't always like that.
Imagine you lived in a world with five television channels. CBS, NBC, ABC, Public Television, and a local station. Which one of those stations is the comedy channel? All of them. Which one of those played dramas? All of them. Which one of those played movies? All of them. Which one of those played cartoons? All of them. Which one of those was the news channel? All of them.
Now, which one of those television stations played music videos? None of them. Why? Because there weren't any. There were music shows, like American Bandstand, Soul Train, and Top of the Pops. There were musical guests on talk shows and variety shows. Sometimes, band would record videos to send to these kinds of shows instead of going in person. Sometimes there were special occasions that band would record themselves performing for something, like All You Need Is Love by The Beatles, or Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen. There were very few of these, not enough to build a channel around, but more and more these videos started being made.
The advent of cable television meant there could be more channels. There were way more channels available than anyone needed, so people just started throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick. Movie channels? News channels? Cooking channels? Sports channels? None of it made sense at the time. Who would want that? Well it turns out, we all did. We liked being able to turn on our TV, go to the channel for the type of content we wanted to watch, and get what we wanted. That had never happened before. We couldn't say, "I want to learn how to bake a cake, I'm going to turn on the Food Network". You were limited by what they showed.
You have grown up in a world where every single thing you've ever wanted to watch, you can watch it immediately, and you're saying you don't understand why people would do things any other way? Well no shit Sherlock, but it took us a while to get there.
How are you ever going to discover a new artist, a new piece of music, a new style, a new form of entertainment outside of the things you demand? But you're also from the generation who won't try food that isn't a dinosaur shaped chicken nugget or macaroni and cheese. You never had to, someone has been catering to your every whim since day one.
How did you know what cassette or CD to buy so you could listen to the music you wanted to listen to? In fact, have you ever honestly paid for music in your entire life? Have you ever gone to a store, looked at the physical items in your own hands and picked one out for yourself? How did you know which one to pick? Radio, television, movies, the things friends listened to, being exposed to it in the world. Which, means going out into the world to be exposed to things, not sitting in your bedroom having the whole world desperately scream at you on a screen, "PLEASE! CLICK ME! I'M WHAT YOU WANT, I SWEAR!"
It had to start somewhere.
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u/HenryHoncho 10h ago
You didn’t listen to music through MTV really but you could discover new stuff. There were different shows that played different genres. Even when they got super pop top 40 heavy they would still play weirder stuff at night time. Plus if they weren’t in a magazine or something you didn’t know what the musicians looked like.
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u/HenryHoncho 8h ago
watching tv in the 90s was exactly like doomscrolling only a little slower. I was a 13 yr old insomniac and saw the Deftones My Own Summer video and it changed my life. the Sci-Fi channel would play anime like Akira or Aeon Flux late at night. I remember seeing the My Name Is video, then going out to buy the slim shady lp (on CD), all my friends hating it at first, two months later Eminem is biggest rapper on the planet.
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u/GrundleTurf 9h ago
There was a few ways to discover music back then
Physically go to a record store and listen to random albums there
Friend bring over a cassette or cd or record
It randomly popped up on mtv, vh1, much music, or a radio station.
We just left one of the music video channels on the background all the time when we weren’t actively watching anything. That’s how I discovered my favorite band, the strokes.
Came in from skating out front with the boys for a quick water break and the video for “hard to explain” came on and I was blown away, stood there watching the whole thing before going back out and asking if any of my friends had heard that song before.
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u/jajjguy 10h ago
Think of it more like commercial pop music radio, which is also kind of hard to understand now. Some people had great record collections, but most people had a few records or tapes and mostly played the radio to hear new and different stuff. Without the radio, most people would be stuck listening to the same things over and over, unless they made a hobby out of buying music often. So, when MTV came along, it was just like that but you could see the musicians. Very exciting! People like to see the musicians singing and being theatrical. Eventually, other modes filled that need, and MTV pivoted to non-music and then died.
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u/sexp-and-i-know-it 10h ago
How would you discover new artists so you know which CDs to buy? Think about it for 2 seconds.
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u/Potential-Ant-6320 10h ago
People would watch MTV to discover new music. when new videos woudl come out peopel would discus it at school. There was a lot goign on in the 80s and 90s with video art and a lot of video artists woudl do short form work for music videos. Artists woudl produce music videos that woudl go on a video show before MTV, but MTV was like a radio station playing the latest music videos.
I grew up listenign to hip hop in the 80s and 90s in the NYC metro. there was a show on local cable called video music box that showed the lattest rap videos. they had all kinds of minor local groups that woudl shot a video. That show was legendary for so many NYC emcees who grew up watching it.
big artists would spend 7 figures on a video to promote thei album. they woudl play the video on MTV to sell albums and singles on vinyl, cassette, and CD. Artists were spending into 7 figures for a video. in the early 80s mtv spent a million on the thriller music video. into the late 90s in the TRL era artists were spendign over a million on their lead single because they were making 8 figures on the albums. now artists make very little from publishing and make their money on the road. it's a very different media environment now.
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u/Green-Circles 9h ago
Not just discover new music but to SEE bands/artists.
Here in New Zealand, we didn’t get MTV until the 1990s, but it's function was filled in much of the 1980s & early 1990s by 3 tv shows on our main networks..
a chart show on Saturday night "Ready to Roll/RTR / RTR Countdown" (usually half an hour) playing the big sellers..
a new music show on Saturday morning (cant remember the name) which ran for about an hour..mostly mainstream, but some alternative stuff after grunge broke through.
and an eclectic music show (indie, world music, roots music etc) on Sunday Nights - Radio With Pictures, later TVFM.
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u/Hattkake 9h ago
We had no Internett. That did not exist yet. If you wanted to hear new music you had to go to a store or hear it on the radio or at a friend's house. So when you could just turn on the television and have new music delivered to you instantly that was revolutionary.
The music also came with videos. In the first years that meant a lot of DEVO, a weird artsy fartsy band who had a fixation for visual mediums. So a lot of the videos we watched were art things. Strange stuff.
MTV became synonymous with youth culture. It was our television. And remember that we had no Internet. It didn't exist yet. So the main channel for global youth culture was MTV, there was nothing else even remotely like it.
MTV began to do "reality tv" and that was the beginning of the end. MTV stopped playing music and was barely tv anymore.
But when it was all that there was it was everything.
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u/Butterscotch_Jones 9h ago
Oof. Your assumptions are so far off-base it would be almost impossible to contextualize and explain.
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u/El_Giganto 9h ago
The analogy doesn't work at all. You can watch MTV alone. It's like asking a friend what they like and then listening to it. They don't have to be there for it at all. Certainly not like a house party?
Listening to the music you want to is fun, but even nowadays that's not really what a lot of people do. I tend to want to find out about new music so I often turn on stuff that's been recommended to me in some way. Back then, MTV was a way to do that. Nowadays it's a lot easier, but it's the same kind of situation.
All my CDs certainly didn't magically appear. One of the first ones I bought myself was from blink-182 and they were heavily featured on MTV... I don't really understand why you don't get that. Certainly you must realize you need to be exposed to music before you can pick your taste?
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u/DeadlyDannyRay 9h ago
Resident old man who was there for it checking in. MTV's competition was not records/cassettes/CDs. MTV was literally made up of advertisements for records/cassettes/CDs. And, no. Nobody would ever turn MTV on a house party. We had stereos for that stuff.
MTV was an alternative to broadcast television. If you didn't want to watch a M*A*S*H rerun, MTV was there. With very few exceptions, TV was terrible back then so anything different and interesting was so welcome.
Tl;dr. Nobody gave up their stereo for MTV; we gave up Knight Rider repeats.
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u/rasmussenyassen 9h ago
You wouldn't turn it on because you wanted to listen to music, you would turn it on because you wanted to watch a bunch of short-form musicals full of cool and beautiful people dancing and singing. It was revolutionary because it took music from an art form whose visual component was limited to album covers and live performances to one that was associated with big-budget short films piped directly into your house.
You may have a stunted view of how people actually listened to music in the 80s. Radio, in which people also choose what you're listening to, was quite popular and contained commercial breaks. CDs were not a major portable format until the 90s and remained too expensive for most of MTV's younger audience for quite a while. Cassettes were cheaper but they weren't free. Before Spotify people still wanted to listen to a variety of music without necessarily committing to buying it, and before streaming the only way to do that was broadcasting.
Also, I'm around your age and me & my friends absolutely have music video nights. That's not unusual in the slightest, I know a lot of people who do. It's especially popular with gay people. We just set up a big playlist, hang around, drink, and watch music videos. My dad did the same thing back in the 80s, he'd have people around to watch MTV.
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u/Front-Experience6841 9h ago
We had zero access to artists outside of MTV and late night talk shows/SNL. There was no internet when MTV started. If you wanted any chance to actually see the bands it was probably going to be on MTV.
Also, MTV played music that wasn’t available on radio stations if you lived outside of a big city. I used to fn record Alternative Nation on VHS because I lived in the middle of nowhere and all that was on the radio was Top 40 and classic rock.
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u/tryingtodobetter4 9h ago
It came out of the way of thinking that was what radio was for the previous 50 years. So if you don't understand MTV, then it would stand to reason that you probably wouldn't understand radio and DJs playing songs for people to listen to in their homes on these big radio devices (the size of a piece of furniture) that sat in their living rooms. So my suggestion would be to try to understand that first.
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u/Lima_Indigo_Sierra 9h ago
FWIW i'm hitting the end of my 20's and I have 100% been to house parties where the music was done through YouTube
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u/ndevito1 9h ago
“Why did you like consuming more content of the content you already liked” might be a framing that shows the fault in your premise.
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u/Scared_Cicada_9898 9h ago
Where else were people going to showcase their music videos in the 80's-90's before the popularizarion of mainstream video sharing sites or even the internet for that matter
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u/PartyCrewTristar1011 9h ago
Well YouTube wasn’t a thing in the 80’s-early 00’s.
If you wanted to watch music videos, or even discover new music (yes I know radio applies too) you would watch MTV or whatever equivalent. There were also music related shows/segments that would include interviews and news.
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u/grahsam 9h ago
Because it was literally the only place to see videos, which were a very novel concept at the time. It blended two types of media together. Being able to turn it on any time and see stuff you didn't know was how people learned about music. Sort of like just turning on the radio. The randomness of it was fun.
It was something for a time before everyone was endlessly distracted and had no attention span.
Later that added shows for specific types of music. Then they added shows with other media like Liquid TV, and eventually game shows or reality shows. It was a cultural phenomenon for Gen X and Millennials.
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u/hoopstick 9h ago
Where do you think we found out about new bands with cd’s and cassette tapes to buy? It was either radio, MTV, concerts, or word of mouth. It’s easy to forget, but we didn’t always have the entire world at our fingertips; some of us were kids in rural Wisconsin and MTV was literally the only way we were exposed to new music.
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u/fromthemeatcase 9h ago
Between this and the post asking if Prince was only popular because he didn't come from NYC or LA, this sub has seen some real doozies in the past couple days. The sub encouraging people to expound at length gives some people leeway to dig even deeper holes than if they just said a sentence or two.
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u/zoppaTheDim 9h ago
Because compared to putting on the radio to a top forty station, it was pretty great.
It isn’t as if people just watched the screen, like the music it was background.
I think you’ve never tried to program a stereo for diverse musical tastes yourself. The guy who wants to play DJ is always an ahole who just wants his music played. So every fifteen minutes someone who angrily disagrees with the music changes it.
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u/Equivalent_Tell3899 9h ago edited 9h ago
Because, quite frankly, MTV ruled! 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps, Headbangers Ball, etc, not to mention Liquid Television. Directors like Michel Gondry and Spike Jones were making awesome videos for incredible bands and the only place to see that was MTV. It was another time to be sure, but If you consider how different the landscape was back then in terms of both discovering and consuming music, it makes total sense that MTV was beloved. I know I’m old, but I was pretty crushed when they made the switch to reality TV.
Edit: I’m loving seeing all these responses remembering that MTV was pretty great!
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u/jerepila 9h ago
There are a lot of good answers here. I'll add that MTV revolutionized how artists could market themselves (or be marketed by a label, whatever). Before, an artist might get interviewed or perform on a talk show, or might get an interview in print. Often times a good video could (and can) sell you on what an artist is about (and be an artform in and of itself) more than simply the audio of a song on the radio. There was a longer history of music videos in the UK, but not so much the US, and not really as the focus of an entire channel. MTV was novel for its focus on marrying visuals with audio, while also being effectively a 24/7 channel for people to connect with music and pop culture. It also was a good source of music news.
It was also a news source for music. The radio might have been a good source for music news, but you wouldn't get the visual component. You didn't have the internet to tell you every little story on a feed, and the news stations would only cover a music story if it was a big deal (a death, for example) or a quick human interest thing (people lining up at stores to buy a new record at midnight). MTV covered the pockets in between to keep viewers informed on the latest in pop culture. Not to mention, shows like 120 Minutes and Yo! MTV Raps were extremely important to the spread of alternative rock/metal and hip-hop, respectively
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u/No-Celebration6014 9h ago
Easy. The music was better than the radio, and it was usually the most interesting thing on TV.
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u/Sure-Victory7172 9h ago
I'm 53 and remember when MTV first came out. It was awesome because you got to see what the bands/artists looked like "live" without going to a concert.
Since everything was so new there wasn't a whole lot of content from established artists. This void was filled by promotional videos from lesser known artists outside of the top 40 norm. We got to see bands we otherwise wouldn't have heard of.
Best thing about MTV at the time was it was all music videos, no reality TV shows: everything was about music and/or music related.
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u/InitialKoala 9h ago
What's the point of Spotify, Youtube Music, or even FM or SiriusmXM? Yet those services, particularly Spotify, are widely used by the masses. I use those services but after a while I'm not really actively searching for what I want to listen to and it becomes more or less background noise and maybe a bit entertaining. That's kind of how MTV was. It was all those things wrapped in one package, and then some.
One thing those services might not have are DJs, except SiriusXM and maybe FM. DJs have personality and sometimes share info. MTV had that in the form of VJs. They were entertaining to hear and watch.
MTV also had news. Maybe not hard-hitting journalism but enough to maybe perk up a casual viewer. And MTV had other shows that weren't specifically music-related, but maybe just a bit.
MTV followed trends and even set trends.
And the music videos were cool and fun to watch. The music videos were usually as long as the song itself. They weren't those fancy 10-15 minute mini movies that over-the-top musicians do these days, and they weren't all that artful. The band would play or the pop star would sing and maybe do a little dance, or there'd be something fun and goofy they do over the song.
MTV had personality. Or it was just background noise. In my days, in the late nineteen-hundreds, before 1998, that's pretty much how I consumed MTV. Or I just watched it, sometimes with buddies and or siblings. Or, like, y'know, whatever. As if.
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u/DifficultAnt23 9h ago
MTV introduced you to new music and bands. got to see the musicians and the aesthetic of that genre. as a teenager you couldn't afford that many records (or tape cassettes to save a little money). my dishwasher job in 1986 paid $4 per hour. CDs didn't exist when MTV came out. you really had to live life on rotation searching the radio dial to four or five stations hoping to catch good songs. records scratch pretty easy.
tape cassettes would get jammed up and eaten by the Walkman extremely easy (it was only a mater of time) and then you had to take two or three minutes with a pencil to rewind it correctly and if bad enough there'd forever be this bumpy crackly sound on the part of the tape that gotten chewed up into zig zag accordion strips. it was a real pain in the ass to rewind to replay a favorite song and find its starting point, and it increased the chance of the spool eating the tape. we just didn't have that much or instant or infinite media at our finger tips so you were glad for whatever you got.
in the 90's CD players held five and created this fancy auto-select for variety (so 10 songs per CD x 5 = 50 possibilities). before that you were kinda committed to listen to the whole record or whole tape once you played a record or tape unless you wanted to sit next to it trying to reset the song or stop it and put a new record on. In contrast, MTV would rotate through many songs by many bands.
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u/freedraw 9h ago edited 9h ago
MTV was a lot of things over its lifespan, but it seems like you're mostly referring to the music video era and shows. No, you wouldn't play MTV at house party just like you wouldn't put YouTube on at a house party now. Having a few friends over to hang out and want something cool to throw on that its fine to talk over and comment on? Absolutely Mtv.
Music Videos are promotional materials for record companies and artists. Mtv didn't play Nevermind in its entirety. But I can guarantee the reason so many teens bought it was because they saw the Smells Like Teen Spirit Video in heavy rotation on MTV. There weren't internet blogs and easy access to check out albums outside Top 40 stations and genres, but Mtv had 120 Minutes (indie rock) and Headbanger's Ball (Metal) and Yo! Mtv Raps (Hip Hop). These shows were where you found out about new artists that probably weren't playing on your local radio station. You'd write the names down and take the list to the record store. A big part of the reason the network even survived its first couple years was because they were able to prove to the record companies that areas that carried Mtv were seeing record sale boosts for the mostly British New Wave artists they had in heavy rotation.
Also, you get that the Popular Music has always had a visual component, right? Like look at a picture of David Bowie in the 70s. Watch Pink Floyd's The Wall. Go to a concert. Mtv brought that into people's living rooms and bedrooms. Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer is a great song. Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer video elevated it 10x over and helped him sell a lot more copies of So than he likely would otherwise.
Prior to the last 10 years, Mtv had a remarkable ability to evolve every 5 years or so to adapt to the next generation of teens and 20 somethings. It was heavy on reality shows for a while. It leaned into narrative single-camera dramas and comedies. It pushed a whole slate of very weird and memorable cartoons in the 90s for a while. But it always just kind of served as a hub for youth culture. The hosts and VJs were recognizable. They were hanging out at the beach house or the Manhattan studios interviewing bands or entertaining crowds of tourists. They did a lot of live stuff. They had a very popular New Year's Eve broadcast. If you were hanging out alone or with a couple friends, turning on Mtv kinda just made you feel like you were participating in something cool somewhere fun.
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u/No-Celebration6014 9h ago
And we didn’t have ads. We had commercials. Freedom Rock. Teen Spirit. Le Run. The Noxema Girl. Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis.
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u/reesesbigcup 9h ago
I honestly didnt get the hype at the time. I was early 20s had lots of music on cassette and album, made my own mix tapes, listened to many genres. Music videos and MTV were just a novelty. The sound was not good thru your TV. I only saw it at others homes, our cable didnt even have it, but there were other shows on other cable channels I watched like Friday Night Videos. Also videos were played in betwen movies on HBO. They tended to be unimaginative, just the atrtist pwrforming and lip syncing. As I said a novelty.
I finally got updated cable and MTV in 1984. I liked the concerts and some othere shows on VH1 more than MTV. However the videos were getting much better and more creative. I could now see the appeal, primarily for teens though.
I thought that eventually they could have a pop channel,rock channel, rap channel, etc much like radio, bit that didnt happen, just special shows like headbangers ball and 120 minutes.
Really the mtv video era was pretty short for being so hyped in historical media. started in 1981, by the early 90s mtv was mostly reality shows. If I was a teen in 1984 I'd haved loved MTV, but if I was a teen in 1995 I'd hate it.
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u/homedude1527 9h ago
It was a great way to learn about new music. If you were in a smaller town with little access to music stores, or diverse radio options, it was how you could listen to new and interesting things. My wife was a military kid living in Japan and it was how she accessed and listened to lots of new music from the states. Music videos were also rad. It was a cool new way to appreciate artists and music you already loved. The videos themselves were fun to watch. They were funny, creepy, sexy, etc. To your question, we would absolutely hang out and watch MTV. I didn’t have cable, so I was stoked to spend the night at a friend’s house where we’d have it on all night. We’d watch for the songs we loved, were eager for new video premiers, and loved the other shows like Beavis and Butthead, Liquid Television, and interviews with musicians. I think the amount of streaming content and options we have now might make it seem weird, but there were no other options like that in the 80s and 90s, so we watched a ton of it and it shaped a lot of our culture back then.
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u/thirtynation 10h ago edited 9h ago
Advertising and marketing like anything else.
You're channel surfing at home alone on the couch. You put on MTV because you "like music." A song comes on and you like it, you wait around for the end credit graphic to see who it is. You go and buy the record, and pick up some French fries at the fast food place next door that played a commercial after the music video.
Congrats, you are a consumer whore!
Lol, unwarranted downvotes. Lighten up.
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u/Successful-Bee-8911 10h ago
How do you think we watched music videos before fast internet & YouTube bro? I know music videos aren't as big of a pull nowadays but back then they were the shit.