Earlier this week, a video appeared on the internet under the title above. “Why doesn’t MTV play music videos anymore?”
The video is intended to be sarcastic–the guy in the video doesn’t really work for MTV and of course, MTV wouldn’t admit to what they’ve done to their channel, (Jersey Shore, the spinoff of Jersey Shore, the spinoff of the spinoff of Jersey Shore, etc.) but what’s being said really rings true. When I was a kid, MTV actually played music videos. We had TRL and the cool thing to do was watch that when you got home from school. The fact that MTV no longer plays music videos anymore is a touchy subject among kids of the 80s and 90s. MTV is obsessed with Twilight, promoting their reality shows, and doing interviews with actors and artists who are popular. The “M” in “MTV” got lost in translation somewhere between 2002 and now, and people are starting to notice. Comments like “Why is MTV still even called MTV? There’s not any music playing anymore”, and “MTV really should change their name since they don’t even try anymore” come from people all over the internet, and MTV has been receiving ridicule for their brainless programming and pandering to popular artists for years now.
The video, posted below, addresses the question that a lot of people really are asking. (Warning: language).
This video really puts the state of the media industry into perspective and addresses the bigger problem at hand–the decline of the media industries due to our almost unlimited access to movies, music, and books. With the advent of social media sites, media is extremely accessible–whether it be music, films, or even books. People can download anything wherever they are, whenever they want, at lightning speeds. People aren’t going out and buying CDs or movies anymore. Why would they? Albums are leaking early, movies are being released into torrents, and e-books are being published online. We can listen to music for free through services like Spotify and Pandora and we can watch music videos for free (albeit, with some annoying commercials) through Youtube. It’s just so much easier to get the things for free and never leave the house, and it’s easier to instantly call up that Carly Rae Jepsen song on YouTube instead of waiting hours for it to maybe pop up on MTV.
In addition, we are given the freedom to download things as we please. Social media allows the links to these downloads to spread extremely fast around the internet and by the time the parent company finds out, hundreds of thousands of people could have downloaded it. It’s not so much that social media is completely to blame here, but without the ability to post things on the internet instantly, what’s happening wouldn’t be a problem.
Obviously this isn’t true for all aspects of the media industry. Marvel’sAvengers film leaked online as a torrent about a week before the actual film came out and that’s not hurting them at all–the film itself made $1.5 billion (500m more than the next-highest grossing movie, The Dark Knight Rises). They could probably care less that the highest grossing film of the year was leaked onto the internet. But for the little hometown band that is trying to make their living, when one fan buys the album, listens to it, uploads it and tells all their friends to download it, they could go under. Or for the independent film that was just released to DVD following rave reviews but nobody buys it because they all saw it online, it’s considered a failure.
But it's not really a failure. It's just how the industry works nowadays.
But it's not really a failure. It's just how the industry works nowadays.
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