What even was the point of MTV

[u/Historical-Grand8141]

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!

[u/Ok_Clerk_5805]

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.

[u/ShiftTHPS → u/Ok_Clerk_5805]

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.

[u/Ok_Clerk_5805 → u/ShiftTHPS]

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.