25 years ago MTV tapped into a global hunger for music, fun and controversy
By Sean Piccoli - Pop Music Writer - Posted July 31 2006
When MTV turns 25 on Tuesday, the original cable music channel will be older than the oldest person in one of its prime target audiences: viewers ages 12-24.
MTV President Christina Norman doesn't put much stock in this tidbit. "It only means something to you guys," she said in an interview last week -- "you guys" being the scribes turning out stories and essays observing MTV's birthday.
Norman's focus is on young viewers who flock to MTV even after 25 years of media proliferation and new claims on the attentions of teens and twentysomethings.
They don't appear to think MTV is getting old. As measured by Nielsen ratings, MTV remains the most watched commercial cable channel among viewers in three overlapping age groups that advertisers crave: 12-24, 18-24 and 12-36. Along the way it has become strange and off-putting to first-generation viewers who remember MTV as pure visual radio.
Today's MTV is an energy drink of stunts, cartoons, reality shows, dating games, hot cars, hit countdowns and star searches. The network that helped make icons of Madonna and Nirvana now turns out nonmusical celebrities such as Johnny Knoxville, the prankster of MTV's Jackass, and Kyndra, the entitled rich girl of the real-life teen series Laguna Beach. The music video blocks that used to be MTV's mainstay hold down a 4-to-9 a.m. graveyard shift.
Hand-wringing over the disappearance of music from Music Television is practically a national pastime. But in Norman's view that complaint overlooks the way MTV works today.
"It's absolutely a mistake to think about [MTV] in terms of its main channel," she said.
The MTV that she runs has many more moving parts than the single channel that made its debut in 1981. Smaller, specialized pieces of MTV exist across cable television, the Internet, and even the mobile-phone spectrum.
MTV's programmers design their content to drive traffic back and forth among the various stops. So college students who participated in a filmmaking contest sponsored by MTV's campus spinoff, mtvU, could have watched the winning entry on the MTV Movie Awards in June, or they can watch it anytime at mtvu.com.
Laguna Beach fans can tune in to its online "after show" at MTV Overdrive, a companion Web site with video on demand that was launched last year. MTV Mobile subscribers can get updates about their favorite MTV programs on their cell phones.
Norman said MTV's future is in "more user-generated content," along the lines of the film contest and, at MTV2, video testimonies that viewers film and post online for the MTV2 program All That Rocks!
Norman denied that more homegrown video was a response to YouTube, a popular Web site where users post and view clips.
"I think it's fair to point out that Overdrive preceded YouTube," she said. "Plus what they have belongs to everybody, and what we have belongs to us."
And if MTV's off-hours video programming doesn't suit a person's schedule, there are videos on MTV2, MTV Hits, MTV Jams and MTV Español. Videos abound on a sister suite of more nostalgia-oriented VH1 channels. MTV Overdrive has a video jukebox of more than 9,000 clips.
The company has generally found that what works in the United States is exportable. MTV channels air in 179 countries and 22 languages.
"To a large extent we emulate the U.S. model," said Josh Greenberg, senior vice president of programming and creative strategy for MTV Latin America, which is headquartered in Miami Beach. "Our programming mix is going to feel similar."
But music videos are more likely to come from Spanish-language artists. And the amount of original, in-country programming is growing. There are Spanish-language MTV shows with not-strictly-Spanish names such as Motorhome and Joystickeros. On one called Rock Dinner, a person is chosen to host and cook a meal at home for his or her favorite band, and the band plays a living-room concert afterward for the lucky chef and friends and family.
"I feel like we're a lot more music-oriented than MTV in the U.S.," he said.
Greenberg, who has worked at English-language MTV, also described the audience he serves now as more passionate about music for music's sake, a cultural difference that translates into more uncut music-video programming, and a more musical tilt to MTV's original series, than is found on English-language MTV.
Greenberg said he can imagine a future of "less and less music videos" on MTV Latin America as those countries become more prosperous, wired-up and awash in the same diversions available to U.S. consumers.
"But I'd like to think that music will still be at the heart of it," he said.
Meanwhile, a new music-video channel is debuting in South Florida on MTV's birthday: The Tube Music Network, launched by one of MTV's founders, media executive Les Garland. The timing of The Tube's arrival on Comcast's digital cable channels is coincidental, said Garland. (The Tube also has a partnership with the broadcast division of Tribune Co., owner of the Sun-Sentinel.)
The Tube does what MTV's mothership used to do -- it airs lots of music videos at all hours of the day. Garland, who remains close to the MTV family, said his new network is not a criticism, implied or otherwise, of his old one. But he conceded that some Tube viewers might feel differently.
"We're seeing a pile of e-mails from people who are over 40 who recall being in college the first time that music on television came into their homes."
Garland forwarded 71 pages of excerpts of e-mails from new viewers around the country. "It's like having MTV when MTV was good," read one that was typical of dozens more.
Sean Piccoli can be reached at spiccoli@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4832.
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