Where's the music?

The rise and, maybe, fall of MTV

by Gary Susman

Did you catch The MTV Movie Awards a couple weeks ago? Mike Myers's "Lord of the Dance" parody was hilarious. And it was poignant to see Lifetime Achievement honoree Chewbacca finally get the recognition denied him at the medal-bestowing ceremony at the end of Star Wars 20 years ago.

Just one question, though: what did all that have to do with music, MTV's ostensible raison d'être? Not much, perhaps, except as a celebration of MTV's ability to deliver its audience of young, spendthrift music listeners to the advertisers behind such leisure-time products as Hollywood movies.

Today, music and niche marketing go hand in hand on television. Differences in taste can be used to separate listeners not just from each other but from their disposable cash as well. Of course, TV has always tried to play music we like with one hand and lift our wallets with the other. Now, however, TV is trying not to bring listeners together but to carve them up into discrete demographic groups ripe for target marketing.

Given television's continuing attempts to second-guess viewers by translating musical preferences into consumer choices, the music has often been lost in the shuffle. Indeed, that has been the perception in recent years on Music Television, which has seemed less M than TV. Although MTV executives have recently added 10 to 20 more hours of weekly music programming -- and though they insist that even before the change, they were still devoting 80 percent of the weekly schedule to music -- the channel's most prominent offerings have been non-musical affairs like Daria and Singled Out, or marginally musical shows like Beavis & Butt-head, Road Rules, The Real World, and The MTV Movie Awards. Whereas MTV once was instrumental in the creation of pop stars from Madonna to Nirvana, its recent headliners have been the likes of Jenny McCarthy and Beavis and Butt-head. Last year, MTV marked its 15th anniversary by launching a new cable channel called M2, which promised music videos from a variety of genres and artists bumping up against one another 24 hours a day. In short, just like MTV in the '80s (see accompanying box).

When MTV first appeared, in 1981, music on TV 24 hours a day was a radical idea and a brilliant innovation, not just in programming but in marketing. Before MTV, music presentation on TV was spotty, haphazard, and infrequent. For performers, especially in the pop world, TV was okay as an occasional showcase, but there was no guarantee that the particular audience for music would be watching. Better to promote yourself the traditional way, on radio or on the concert circuit.

After all, if you wanted to appear on TV, you had to cater to a mass audience. If you were Elvis appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show, you had to settle for the cameraman's shooting only above your swiveling hips. (And if you were the Rolling Stones or the Doors, you had to clean up your lyrics.) Of course, the reward, if you played nice, was a huge audience. Some 73 million people saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan -- more than twice the average weekly viewership of a top-rated 1997 show like Seinfeld. In those days, the eclectic, ecumenical Sullivan could follow the Beatles with Isaac Stern; he offered something for everyone. With only three channels, what else were people going to watch?

Yet though the record industry had discovered teenagers, a specialized audience for a particular genre of music, and had figured out how to cater to them, TV was slow to follow. It ghettoized pop-music programming, like American Bandstand and later The Midnight Special, to odd hours, or presented it in prime time with grudging condescension (performance shows like Shindig, or cynical corporate fabrications like The Monkees).

By the early 1970s, with the country riven by distinctions of race, sex, age, class, and politics, TV had all but given up trying to please a mass audience. (The notable exception was The Tonight Show, which continued to program the widest spectrum of music. Even Johnny Carson's consensus was fragile, as was demonstrated by the swarm of demographically diverse late-night shows that battled in the wake of his retirement.) The variety show was all but dead; those that survived were musically suspect. (C'mon, you didn't watch Sonny and Cher or Donny and Marie to groove on the tunes, did you?) Rock was relegated to the wee hours (The Midnight Special, Saturday Night Live), disco to Saturday mornings with Dick Clark. It was as if TV had given up trying to attract the young, record-buying audience, at least with the carrot of the music that audience liked.

That's why MTV was such a stroke of genius. Not just because it broadcast pop music to cable subscribers (that is, people who already wanted to hear it) at all hours of the day and night, but because it broadcast commercials 24 hours a day. (What else was a music video, initially, but an ad for the single or album?) Imagine: people paying extra to watch commercials all day. And where there are young people who will pay to watch music videos, there are young people who will pay to buy records -- and shampoo, and candy, and movie tickets. As record companies realized MTV's potential, they lavished as much money and imagination on videos as they did on albums. MTV eclipsed radio as pop's tastemaker.

Initially, MTV moved to expand, not divide, its demographics. The success of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" caused the channel to add R&B, and later rap, metal, and what would come to be known as alternative. MTV spawned a sister channel, VH1, to play classic-rock artists who appealed to an older (but still lucrative) audience. Channels specializing in country and other more specialized genres followed.

MTV's programming became less free-form, with genres being herded into distinct programs like Yo! MTV Raps and Alternative Nation. As MTV learned how to deliver demographic segments to advertisers, the music became secondary to the idea of MTV's identity as a youth-culture outpost, as reflected by the new programs. With Beavis & Butt-head, MTV even began to make fun of its audience and its own diminishing capacity to spotlight good music -- while still drawing that audience in large numbers.

That viewers are no longer watching MTV for its musical content became evident this March when the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Association of Recording Merchandisers issued a study of how young people make their music-purchasing choices. Although some teens appreciated MTV as a source of R&B information, the study found that "MTV appears to be surprisingly irrelevant . . . across all demographic segments." It added, "MTV appears to be perceived as another entertainment outlet on cable, rather than a music-oriented cable channel," and, "MTV was not viewed as a primary source of information by the majority of all respondents." If that wasn't enough, MTV's first-quarter ratings were down 20 percent compared to the same period last year.

With MTV now ineffectual as a tastemaker -- witness how its attempt to make electronica the next big thing has been slowed by wads of bubblegum throwback music from the videogenic likes of the Spice Girls and Hanson -- the channel is having to rethink its strategy. Ironically, that strategy is the old shotgun approach aimed at a broader audience. Hence M2 -- which disregards the genre distinctions of its older sibling -- as well as a couple hours per week of M2-style programming on MTV. The channel is even resurrecting the variety show with Oddville, which debuted last week. Whatever its direction, if MTV does figure out how to make its something-for-everyone strategy work, the advertisers will come running. And music, the unruly genie that once granted wishes, will have to be shoved back into the lamp.