Interesting article.

How MTV stopped playing music — and lost its relevance

https://nypost.com/article/how-mtv-stopped-playing-music-and-lost-its-relevance/

Excerpts:

As one of the five original VJs who launched MTV into the Moonman stratosphere 40 years ago, on Aug. 1, 1981, Alan Hunter helped put the video-bingeing network on the music map.

But when he trekked down to Daytona Beach, Fla., to cover “the chaos that was spring break” for the first time in 1986, little did he know that it was the beginning of the end for the M — music — in MTV.

“I was the VJ that loved being out of the studio the most, so I was the one they sent to spring break to be a part of the thousands of screaming young guys cracking beers over my head,” Hunter, 64, told The Post.

“And that was kind of the beginning of different kinds of shows that you would see. That was when MTV decided that they couldn’t just be a video jukebox forever. MTV began to train their cameras on the lifestyle of the young folks that were watching MTV.”

Thirty-five years after that coverage, there is a whole generation of young people who don’t know that MTV ever played music videos. Which helps explain why young pop stars such as Billie Eilish, Harry Styles and Megan Thee Stallion didn’t even bother to show up for the Video Music Awards last year. To them — and many others in the music industry and beyond — MTV simply isn’t relevant as the cultural force it used to be back when Madonna was humping around in a wedding gown to “Like a Virgin” at the 1984 VMAs, when Kurt Cobain was beautifully deconstructing Nirvana on “MTV Unplugged” in 1993, and Beyoncé and Jay-Z went public as a couple on “Total Request Live” in 2002.

We just don’t want our MTV anymore.

The MTV that people remember from the 1980s was a wonderful thing,” said former MTV producer Michael Alex. But, he added, nostalgia doesn’t pay the bills: “There’s the cultural loss versus MTV was an ongoing business trying to survive. The channel hung on as long as it could .”

Many single out “The Real World” — which premiered in 1992 and is largely credited (and sometimes blamed) for jump-starting the reality-television boom — for turning MTV into the “Teen Mom” and “Ridiculousness” universe that it is today. But that movement was already in motion.

Over time, MTV became known for Pauly Shore and then “Jersey Shore” as much as it used to be known for Michael Jackson and then Janet Jackson. “I would cover the Grammys, and I would go on the red carpet with Snooki,” said former MTV News senior writer and editor Gil Kaufman. “Snooki would be interviewing Katy Perry. Those people kind of became the face of MTV in the same way that Simon Le Bon or Boy George were the face of MTV at the beginning.”

Although “I don’t think anybody was particularly excited about it,” Kaufman said, “we understood that that’s the direction that things were going and that those decisions were being made in suites that were several floors above us. So you couldn’t turn it around, you know what I mean?”

The M that played the biggest factor in MTV’s change in direction was money. “I mean, MTV needed to make money, ultimately, and you can make more money with programming that sponsors can hang their hats on,” said Hunter. “And that was what the ’90s were all about.”

Even beyond the music, though, MTV doesn’t capture the zeitgeist of today’s youth the way it once did. In fact, it’s barely on the radar of the TikTok generation. “I have two teenage kids, and they know that I worked for MTV, but they’ve never seen MTV,” said Kaufman, who, after working at the network for 15-plus years, is now a senior contributing writer at Billboard. “They wouldn’t even know where to look for it.”