Headline at Roger Friedman's Showbiz 411.
All that’s left is a placeholder site for reality shows. The M in MTV – music — is gone, and so is all the reporting and all the journalism performed by music and political writers ever written. It’s as if MTV never existed. (It’s the same for VH1.com, all gone.)...
MTV News became a force in music, entertainment, and politics in the early 90s. As the channel’s popularity soared, the News division — including the faces of Kurt Loder, Alison Stewart, Serena Altschul, Sway, and John Norris — became incredibly important especially to political campaigns. Now all those interviews — hundreds of thousands of hours with rock stars and what we now call influencers of generations — have been replaced by a link to “Help! I’m in a Secret Relationship.”...
There is fury among MTV.com writers past and present who now see their histories erased, along with all the music and political reporting....
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"Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped."
- Orwell
Obligatory.
That seems like a wasted opportunity to me. All of that stuff could have been monetized. How short-sighted!
And like RideSpaceMountain says: Very much 1984.
AI Killed the Video Star.
Today's youth culture perfectly encapsulated in a few sentences:
"This follows the shut down of MTV News on the channel last year. MTV is now just a graveyard for reality show crap. All of its substance has been desiccated over time."
No news, no history, just manufactured reality crap.
Funny, I was just wondering whatever happened to MTV a few days ago. It was one of those channels I blocked off of my guide.
MTV went ALL-IN on reality TV aimed at the teen, 18-28 crowd (and mostly the younger end of that).
And stopped being what they were.
But erasing that history seems dumb and as others have pointed out....there was monetization opportunity there.
Who?
"...the News division — including the faces of Kurt Loder, Alison Stewart, Serena Altschul, Sway, and John Norris — became incredibly important especially to political campaigns."
Yeah, and those Der Stürmer and Völkischer Beobachter archives have been thoroughly scrubbled as well.
The condition of California is at least partly traceable to voters who were influenced by faces.
Such a crush on Daisy…
It's not just that MTV no longer plays music, it's that MTV no longer matters. They were once important to the culture and now they are not.
Why would they deliberately erase their own golden age?
80’s music videos were evidence people weren’t always angry and divided.
The historical records must be scrubbed.
Is there no Internet Archive for this cultural moment?
Like tearing down statues...
Yet we have cable TV (and others) operating businesses that live on reruns.
Unless I'm mis-reading the article, the shows may still exist on some server or servers somewhere -- still around but not available to the general public.
Anyone following the saga of the company Paramount should not be surprised. Owner Shari Redstone seems driven to destroy her inheritance.
"Paramount Erases Archives of MTV Website, Wipes Music, Culture History After 30 Plus Years."
OMG! They erased eleven years of music videos!
There's a certain reality y'all are missing: web hosting for static content is amazingly cheap, but it's not actually *free*.
The situation with physical printed content is quite similar -- while the continued physical existence of an already printed volume doesn't cost anything, hosting a collection of such physical items certainly does.
Paramount killed the MTV star.
I had no use for MTV news but loved the pure rock days of the early 80s, before they got shamed into diversity and all.
They're just trying to cover up the Van Halen "Lost Weekend" contest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMlxspJs2nM
This is the U.S. version of the Taliban blowing up Buddha sculptures in Afghanistan, except the product being destroyed is much younger and the reason was that it was unprofitable rather than un-Islamic.
>90% crap, of course.
As a historian, librarian, and archivist I always told people that preserving the culture of the past costs money. Ask Nicholson Baker.
Cultural vandalism. Perhaps there ought to be some institution like the Library of Congress that can accept donations of dead websites that once had relevance, with funding to keep them accessible on-line.
Not the same as the burning of the Library at Alexandra, but a loss nonetheless. Maybe it was unintentional and someone clicked on the wrong button. These things happen. That's what happened to some of the files on Hunter's laptop.
Data storage costs money. If someone doesn't like that, they should offer to cover the costs.
became incredibly important especially to political campaigns.
Stop it. We all all know it was important Democrat political campaigns only.
"Rock journalists" have been telling each other they are crucial to society for decades. There is no "important" song or musician, just popular/unpopular ones.
I was witness at the birth of MTV. It is difficult today to get people under the age of 35 to understand what a cultural force it was for young people of those days. Now, I haven't watched anything on MTV or VH1 in the last 30 years but I remember it fondly for the period from 1981 until about 1992 or so.
People criticize it for moving away from music videos but music videos were probably always a dead end in programming. When was the last "must see" music video produced? Probably sometime in the late 80s.
Wow, Serena Atschul.
She was pretty cute.
Seems like they just erased a time capsule. One should never erase time capsules. Unless you think history began in 2009. Which it seems, many do.
I was witness at the birth of MTV. It is difficult today to get people under the age of 35 to understand what a cultural force it was for young people of those days. Now, I haven't watched anything on MTV or VH1 in the last 30 years but I remember it fondly for the period from 1981 until about 1992 or so.
Was trying to explain this to my 24 year old daughter yesterday.
On my deathbed, I will still be able to remember Michael Jackson dancing on lighted pavement, Madonna aping Marilyn Monroe, and Duran Duran on a sailboat.
What is history anyway?
"On my deathbed, I will still be able to remember Michael Jackson dancing on lighted pavement, Madonna aping Marilyn Monroe, and Duran Duran on a sailboat."
You'd be wrong. You only imagined it, comrade...
TCM should buy the archives.
Turner Classic Music.
I understand that storing data costs money, but not all that much. A 44TB drive via Ann's portal is only $330. Not that this is what is needed, just give an ide of how cheap storage is these days.
Hosting and serving it may cost quite a bit more. but that is no reason to destroy it.
As someone else said, I find it hard to believe that it is actually gone, as opposed to just being inaccessable.
I wonder if copyright on the music videos is an issue? Licensed for TV, are they licensed for streaming? If not, it might just be too difficult to track down the copyright owners.
But all the non-music video would be owned by MTV. So should not be an issue.
Assuming rights are not an issue, I can't imagine that this could not be hosted on a youtube channel profitably.
Johnny Carson's family is still selling reruns "Best of..." of Carson from the early 60s on. Apparently making a fortune at it. perhaps more than Johnny made for the original shows.
John Henry
What does "I want my MTV!" mean anymore?
In Rutger Hauer's death scene in Bladerunner, the Nexus-6 character had seen and done amazing things in its existence. When it bemoaned that all those experiences would be gone "like tears in rain" he had a basis for complaint.
Losing MTV's "news" archives is like losing a used Kleenex. Perhaps a future geneticist could unlock a cure for some future plague from a well preserved used Kleenex, but it is very, very unlikely. Similarly, those news archives from MTV have nothing more important in them than the time a cheeky kid asked Clinton "Boxers or Briefs?" in what was probably a pre-planned moment of populism for the candidate. It was a huge storage of nothing. Has anyone used it for anything, has anyone seen or read anything from that archive, in the past decade or two?
Vandals vandalized. How does it feel?
Why would they deliberately erase their own golden age?
Along the lines of what DarkIsland said, one guess might be that they are planning to package these archives and sell them in pieces.
Who was using MTV's site to watch classic videos anyway? They're all easily available on YouTube, which is how I show them to my kids!
(Take on Me is one of their favorite videos - they have good taste!)
Preserving the past costs peanuts in the big scheme of things. Its obvious the power elite are destroying books and erasing video of the past. That was America 1.0 and not needed in American 2.0
The USSR did the same thing. And we're being ruled by the same kinds of people. Of course, does anyone REALLY care? When have 'muricans ever cared about books or culture? LOL. Just give em some beer and a football game.
If we had a real congress that truly represented the american people, the copyright law would be 50 years - period. All the books would be scanned and PDF'd and put into an internet archive where we could all enjoy them. And same is true of the old TV shows and movies, and music.
Of course, we don't have that because Congress is made up of bought off used car salemen. The media can buy them off with 100 dollar steak dinner. They're whores and they come cheap.
“ Who was using MTV's site to watch classic videos anyway? They're all easily available on YouTube, which is how I show them to my kids!”
The concern expressed in the linked article is about the MTV news segments – the journalism.
Tabitha Soren’s interview of HW Bush late in the 1992 Campaign on the back of a moving train was pretty funny. HW was seething his campaign people made him do it and it shows throughout the entire interview.
""Rock journalists" have been telling each other they are crucial to society for decades. There is no "important" song or musician, just popular/unpopular ones."
This is the truth.
I recall Kennedy, Fuentes, Soren, and Martha Quinn, but not Altschul.
There were some noobguys too.
I doubt that the data has been totally "erased." They just removed it from their streaming service. The videos are probably still being stored somewhere.
I looked Altschul up but still don't recall her.
My MTV years ended in the early 90s, IIRC. Maybe she came later.
Adam Curry is still doing real journalism, with John C Dvorak, at www.noagendashow.com
He is also responsible for the now widely used "Podcasting 2.0" podcasting platform that eliminates reliance on Apply and Google for podcast distribution.
John Henry
You would think some silicon valley gazillionaires would donate funds to some universities to set up libraries. We went through this with early films and early tv.
And yet, Kennedy abides on Fox.
Podcasts killed the video star.
Thank God. Flush it away. Free - dom , Free - dom !
loudogblog:
I doubt that the data has been totally "erased." They just removed it from their streaming service. The videos are probably still being stored somewhere.
Don't count on it. Remember that many hundreds of early TV programs were erased and recorded over to save money. All gone, never to be recovered.
I was there at the beginning, too. A couple of times I sat for like 4-5 hours just watching it (in the early-mid 1980s) as either boredom control or because I was too ill to do anything else. I liked that the VJs actually told you something about the band/song/video before or after.
I remember watching The Police's Every Breath You Take released on video before any other version (i.e., radio) and thought it was significant.
MTV News. . . . .meh. When they stuck to purely music stuff it could be interesting. I believe Kurt Loder ragged on it when he was at Rolling Stone, and then became their main news guy. I thought that was funny.
Here's an article on issues involved in digital archiving, I thought it was interesting.
Writing in the Sand: The Need for Ultra-Robust Digital Archiving
Erasing Generation X. Not surprised. I'm only 55.
I’d be surprised if some IT guy didn’t walk out of the building with all that data on USB drives.
The archival storage can be a difficult problem. Magnetic hard disk drives have a life of about 3-6 years before something fails and the drive needs to be replaced. Typically drives need to be replaced with something “newer” as manufacturers move to newer and more dense formats. There is a move to solid state drives which also have a similar but slightly longer useful life before failing. The issue with SSDs however is that an electrical charge is required to maintain the data. An unpowered SSD drive can possibly lose data if unpowered for a couple years. The amount of time depends on a number of factors but it is not infinite. Magnetic tape is still useful for archival purposes. I have worked with companies that have had boatloads of old magnetic tapes but no working tape drive available to read them. So, a big part of the archival problem is not just putting it on cheap storage media but that it likely needs to be copied to new media every few years. A lot of time and effort.
The three most important words in e-data preservation: migration, migration, migration.
Mason G's link is very good.
Mason’s link is excellent…..
I was at a Dash Riprock show in Birmingham one night. MTV news was going to be going live with them at about midnight for a news segment. It happened, it was cool as fuck.
They also reported the death of Dan McClain aka Country Dick Montana (One of the nicest people I ever met) who died onstage in Whistler, as a matter of fact, they rolled the tape. Broke my heart man.
WK:
Magnetic hard disk drives have a life of about 3-6 years before something fails and the drive needs to be replaced.
This may be true if you power your system up and down repeatedly. I have drives C:, I:, J: and K: onboard. They're originals with the system and all have been running nonstop for well over a decade.
Leave them up and running and save bearing wear.
Not being a fool I backup everything with great frequency to external drives E: and N: and ghost my C: drive if things change.
I have old SCSI drives from the 1990's that still spin up and have good data on them. I don't recommend doing this with important data...
My husband (a music typesetter, among other things) was called upon a few years ago to retrieve an opera score and parts by Joaquin Nin-Culmell by Editions Max Eschig. Seems their Paris basement had flooded. He'd copied that a long time ago -- so long that the entire thing was on 5 1/4" floppies. Amazingly, he was able to borrow a computer old enough to have drives for those, and he resuscitated the edition. But wow, what a bother.
Blogger Mason G said...
Here's an article on issues involved in digital archiving, I thought it was interesting.
Writing in the Sand: The Need for Ultra-Robust Digital Archiving
Fascinating article, Mason.
Another, sort of related article, published last week in the Construction Physics Substack. It is about energy use in data centers. I had no idea it was so much. Amazon has several data centers that each consume a gigawatt or more. A gigawatt is the equivalent of a large nuclear generating plant.
Article here https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-to-build-an-ai-data-center
John Henry
I felt the same way back when my mom threw away my comic book collection and my boxes of record albums. "If you really wanted this stuff", Mom said, "then why didn't you take care of it instead of leaving it here?" I had no answer. Go figure? MTV? They are a mental blur to me. We were too poor to even have a decent TV set let alone cable. More silly WPP problems tbh.
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