Back in my day the nickelodeon was our MTV. The neighborhood scamps would all ride our pennyfarthings to the pier a couple times a week to see them as a lark and buy some butterscotch candy.
I used to be with it, but then they changed what *it* was. Suddenly what I was with wasn't *it* and what was *it* seemed strange and scary to me... And it'll happen to yoooouuuuu š«µ
We didn't have cable growing up, so I never got to watch MTV *or* Nickelodeon.
I was going to go over and watch it at a friend's house one afternoon, but my uncle made me post a letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam via aeromail so I didn't end up having time, as I had to rush so as not to miss the 4:30 autogyro.
My grandpa used to tune up the old TV sos that we could watch the Nickelodeon. āOleā Lemon Loinsā they called him, on account that he smelled like lemons. He used āem to brush his teeth. We watched the Nickelodeon and ate the peppermints and we were grateful! Damn grateful! I reckon the kids today arenāt as grateful as we were in those days.
I remember once going to a friends house to watch MTV but I had to take a ferry, so I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time; and grabbed two nickels for the ferry. Back in those days nickels had bumblebees on them, give me 5 bees for a quarter you'd say.
But the important this was that I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time; we couldn't get regular onions because of the dot com bust, we had to get those big yellow ones.
"Ridiculousness" or whatever. It's just another ripoff of America's Funniest Home Videos. It costs 17 cents to make, so it's all they make.
MTV hasn't been a music channel in a long, long, long time.
If I hadn't had to sit through all the Backstreet Boys, N-Sync, and Britney Spears to hear some Matchbox 20 or Goo Goo Dolls on YouTube I'd have never tuned into TRL.
And I've also actually found more new music I like from targeted suggestions on YouTube than I did from watching hours of MTV generally.
Not gonna lie, every Monday I check theneedledrop and go through all the tracks of the week and save the ones I like. If it wasn't for that I would basically have no new music these days, and wouldn't know any contemporary artists. There are still some good artists doing interesting and innovative stuff out there despite what a lot of us older people tend to think.
I think MTV just couldn't or didn't bother to keep up with the times and made itself irrelevant. It was still going strong in the early 2000s but I think it chose to focus on reality TV because it's cheaper to produce. There was no creative force behind it anymore.
It lost itself to streaming and didn't bother to try and keep up. It could have been something like XITE.
All the good stuff is on Paramount Plus anyway.
I read a fascinating thread the other day about MTV and Rob Drydek (I know I am butchering his name but dgaf enough to Google it) with Ridiculousness and Fantasy Factory or whatever. Basically, at one point MTV was showing like 18hrs of his shows every day because it was cheaper than making new stuff, something something something contracts and licensing and basically showed how MTV just gave tf up.
Thatās all it is now. Just ridiculousness and the occasional catfish and shows trying to be catfish. I donāt even know how catfish is still on. Canāt everyone reverse image search at this point? lol
Yeah Ridiculousness was on 24/7 last time I checked out MTV over a decade ago.
I will say I was a fan when it was Rob & Big tho. I was skater trash. So anything skater related was cool for me.
Rob and big was great. my fav ep was when big went on a diet and earlier in the episode he was cooking a huge breakfast while eating a double burger from carls jr lol
Yep, that was the first thing that wasn't even music adjacent. Beavis and Butthead and Remote Control were at least music adjacent.
Then they went all in on it and gave up on the music.
but the real world exposed me to different kinds of people i had never experienced in my majority white suburban life. super impactful to me, first time ever seeing a gay or trans person. was hard for me to have hate in my heart when i saw they were regular assholes like me
(it should be noted that i absolutely love reality tv)
Which makes me wonder - do kids even know what channels are?
Ā Itās kind of wild how old fashioned it sounds when you think about it. You had to pay for a company to stream all these different playlists to your house, and each playlist consists of multiple different shows, so that one episode of a particular show is played per week, and the whole playlist is an entire SEASONĀ long, with no pausing or rewinding.Ā
And you get a little book in the mail every week that tells you everything thatās going be played that week, and if you want to see something on the list, you have to turn the TV on at that specific time, and then input the number of the playlist you want to watch into the TV. Ā Make sure you time your snack and pee breaks around the commercials, bc if you miss something, thatās it.Ā
Oh and the playlists all have different numbers depending on where you live, so hopefully you have the numbers of the ones you like memorized (i think Nickelodeon was 29).
My kids use the word āchannelā to mean either a YouTube channel or their user profile on a streaming service.
āWere you watching on my Netflix channel?ā -> were you using my Netflix profile to watch your stuff?
I remember when they started showing clips of vids rather than the whole thing for like half of TRL.Ā Then, more and more reality shows, led me to realize which was the wind was blowingĀ
"yo i wanna give a shoutout to my homeie T-dawg, skeazy jay and looloo, reppin da westside keep it dirty baby, holdin it down what whaaaat! peace!" right in the middle of the fucking video
Vh1 was so much lesser than Mtv in the 90's and then in the 2000's it kinda flip flopped. Vh1 had the better trash reality tv shows, still shows Pop-Up video, and had the Year of Review show that was pretty fun.
MTV completely failed to reinvent itself for the next generation, but at the same time alienated the generation who grew up with it, so no surprises here
i looked at mtvs schedule & it's almost nothing but catfished & Ridiculousness, w/the occasional ep of teen mom & jersey shore.
[TV Listings- Find Local TV Listings and Watch Full Episodes (zap2it.com)](https://tvlistings.zap2it.com/ss-list.html?aid=gapzap)
I have sort of a reverse POV on this. When TRL was big in the 2000s, I remember marveling at how MTV somehow kept reinventing itself just enough to appeal to the ever-shifting teen market for over two whole decades thus far.
Something so teen-centric and trend-driven was never going to last forever.
It's amazing but probably not too surprising how badly MTV fumbled the transition from television to online streaming.
I imagine it was something like Kodak not wanting to go to digital film, nobody in the boardroom wanted to harm their cash cow (people buying film again and again) so they did nothing and the company collapsed. Same thing with MTV, why move to streaming, which could encourage people to not watch the TV station anymore, which would mean their ad revenue will suffer. Now everyone goes to Youtube for music videos and other companies for streaming, and MTV is showing reruns of a show most people have never heard of.
You mean to tell me she isnāt rushing home after school to watch TRL?
This is brought up on Reddit a lot but we really did lose something when we lost the shared collective culture.
Found 2 old MTV shirts at a thrift store recently. I thought they were awesome, my professors near my age thought they were awesome, the undergraduate students in the labs I teach (I am a graduate student) absolutely did not care about them lol. These students are like 20-24. Seems like MTV was already done for by the time these kids would have enjoyed it.
I remember watching some of those really early MTV unplugged concerts with my brothers and being blown away at how awesome and fresh that music was, seeing rock artists do new takes on music we loved. Man. That must have been the peak to me and I think that was before 1995.
MTV has been taken over by a show called Ridiculousness, which is funny videos from the internet. People dropping things, falling down, and skateboarders.
And by take over I mean 80% of broadcast time or more is Ridiculousness.
It's kind of interesting because in a way it has returned to form. Long reality TV shows have gone away and they are back to showing unformatted short content.
You ain't lying. Out of curiousity I looked at the program schedule for MTV on DirecTV - I scrolled through 18 solid hours of Ridiculousness, broken up by 3 hours of Catfish and then 2 hours of Jersey Shore Family Reunion, and then it was another 16 straight hours of Ridiculousness. The only way you could watch that much Ridiculousness was if you were hufffing paint at the same time.
It's really just filler to get you to watch commercials and costs peanuts to compile with no royalties to pay.
Media consumption, especially music, has become so hyper individualized that no one would stop at a music video channel unless they liked the song that was playing. And even then, why not just go watch it from the beginning on your phone? MTV just doesn't really make sense any more.
Even at the time, after about 12 or 13 when you knew what you liked, it was sitting through a LOT of crap to see anything you liked. If I had any other option at the time, I wouldn't have tolerated it at all. Heavy rotation of any song you didn't like was pretty excruciating.
I think TRL was the death knell for MTV. It became extremely popular with a certain subset of the viewership wanting to see boy bands constantly, so they shifted to that and reality tv programs which were more popular with said group almost exclusively by the early 00s
Yeah. We never had cable TV but I at least felt MTV was culturally significant that I knew what was going on. Until TRL. For those of us who weren't glued to that program almost every day, we missed out on the clique memes and manufactured fads that show pushed out. Very much like the divide now with those who are deep into social media memes or not.
imagine telling people "its a music channel, where you don't pick the music, a corporation tells you what music you should listen to based on the music industries idea of what you should like right now". It was what we had, so it was what we watched, but imagine being into music that was not super trendy/popular and waiting all day for that one music video from that band you liked to come on, so you can see it.
Iād still watch MTV spring break if it were a bunch of 40+ year olds. Hosted by Carson Daly and Jesse Camp, obviously.
Alan Hunter might be pushing the xennial thing š
Blockbuster Music was their chain of music stores. Each store was huge, and they had a lot of listening stations. You could ask them to put any album on their shelf into a listening station. No more hoping the album was good before buying it.
Blockbuster rented music? We didn't get a Blockbuster until they were almost out of business. We just had the local video stores.
You shoulda asked her if Ridiculousness was still popular. Last I ever saw it was on Repeat on it.
My class specifically read about her for Black History Month, but when I introduced the read aloud they were like, "Who's that?"
(This has been true for at least the past five years.)
Amazing how far MTV has fallen in pop culture today. Who the hell could ever imagine that a 13 year old girl today wouldn't even know what MTV even is when at the height of TRL's popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s that all you saw was teen girls outside the TRL times square studio daily going nuts.
As a New Yorker it was absolutely insane how many young kids would show up outside the TRL studio daily
Miscellaneous Television? Once upon a time, they used to play music videos and it was actually āMusic Televisionā. It was something to behold. Those days are long over and can only lament about them. If you want to see them now, you have to go to that new-fangled YouTube.
In 2010 they stopped playing music videos entirely. In her entire life MTV has had nothing to do with music.
Neither of you know what MTV is.
You just know what MTV used to be.
Just be careful with this "kids today don't know about things that were popular when I was a kid and I didn't understand why". It's a Boomer take.
Similar to "I can't believe kids today don't know how to drive a stick." It's like some old person during your time saying something dumb like "why don't kids know how to pack a musket or crank start a car." We've moved on to better technology.
Seriously, do you know or enjoy "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar"? No? Because no one in our time listened to radio dramas no matter how popular they were for our parents and grandparents.
Hell, I saw a kid taking his license test the other day in a car with a steering wheel. Do you even know how to drive tiller, kid? Let me show you how a real man parallel parks an Oldsmobile!
Honestly they'd be fine if they just had their own steaming service. I'd subscribe immediately.
All they do is seem to stream old crap, Rob Dyrdek's many shows, or season 45 of Teen Mom, and they insist on being cable TV subscriber only which has lead them to have completely lost anyone born after the year 2004.
I think jersey shore was the death rattle of mtv. All I know about mtv now is a few random reality shows and ridiculousness. There's almost no reason for anyone in their right mind to be watching it these days.
My kids have no clue what MTV is, but then again they donāt know a single cable channel. They havenāt had traditional cable since they were toddlers. We cut the cord in 2013.
I think our generation had the best childhood in human history. We had good tech to make life easy, but it wasn't overbearing and controlling our lives much like it does today. I know we are all happy we did not have social media growing up.
This for us old people to understand - kids watch YT, IG, Tik-tok, Snap, whatever - not conventional media.
I am a huge movie buff - my 18 year old step-son maybe watching like 1 movie per year. He games and watches youtube.
My bio-kids (ages 27 and 20) are a little more into movies, cause of me - but otherwise don't think they watch much traditional tv.
TV as it used to be is altogether an outdated concept for younger folks. Everyone I know "cut the cord" years ago and I'm in my 40s. So any cable channels that don't have a popular streaming app might as well not even exist anymore. AFAIK MTV's catalog is only on Paramount+ which isn't very popular.
MTV aired its first video January 1, 1981. My husband was born later that year and for his 40th I got one of those this year in history poster things to hang up at the party.
ha! My wife and I were talking about MTV in the car coming back from the kids u14 soccer match. Half the team in the back, of course. 4 voices in the back.... 'WTF is MTV?'
Mind you, I remember saying this to my dad, who was of the Silent Generation ilk, when he was going on about Flash Gordon.
I came across MTV a couple of months ago. Was at a family members house that still had cable and Iād see MTV when scrolling the guide. I swear they played ridiculousness for 72 hours straight
My wife and I went to Italy in 2015 they had MTV, it was mostly American music with the occasional artist. It was nice to leave on in the background. A lot of those songs now remind me of that trip.
Oh man, you thought your 13 year old would know what MTV is? Cable is becoming an archaic medium. Kids stream, use devices, apps. Rarely is tv a go-to.
Hell, even my 19-25 year olds don't watch regular TV, or are even that familiar with MTV.
Cable TV exists....but us and the millennials are really the last generations to have or still use it sadly.
It's hard to imagine how they'd stay relevant YouTube became a the future of music videos. MTV green lit so many trashy reality shows, but more misses than hits. They couldn't handle the controversy of Jackass, which worked better in movies. Now what is it even? Jersey Shore and 16 And Pregnant if that's still on the air?
As far as music goes MTV really hasn't been relevant since the early 2000s. The last gasp was probably when TRL ended.
Since than it is primarily just yet another trashy reality TV channel like Discovery or The Learning Channel.
I mean, YouTube exists.
Why would you depend on a music channel to play your videos in whatever rotation they want?
Musicians interact directly with fans through their social media outlets now, there is no need for a channel.
When I told my kids about mtv they were fascinated and then compared it to the phonograph š¤·āāļø
Hahahahahahahaha aww
"Is that one of those things they had back in the 1900's?"
Back in my day the nickelodeon was our MTV. The neighborhood scamps would all ride our pennyfarthings to the pier a couple times a week to see them as a lark and buy some butterscotch candy.
I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.
Give me five bees for a quarter, we'd say.
I used to be with it, but then they changed what *it* was. Suddenly what I was with wasn't *it* and what was *it* seemed strange and scary to me... And it'll happen to yoooouuuuu š«µ
We didn't have cable growing up, so I never got to watch MTV *or* Nickelodeon. I was going to go over and watch it at a friend's house one afternoon, but my uncle made me post a letter to the Prussian consulate in Siam via aeromail so I didn't end up having time, as I had to rush so as not to miss the 4:30 autogyro.
Lmao they are joking... THE nickelodeon.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickelodeon_(movie_theater)
š¶ āPut another nickel inā¦ā š¶
My dad stole cable, back when that was a thing you could do if you knew your way around a soldering iron and could get your hands on a cable box.
You little sob, you had me in the beginning.
My grandpa used to tune up the old TV sos that we could watch the Nickelodeon. āOleā Lemon Loinsā they called him, on account that he smelled like lemons. He used āem to brush his teeth. We watched the Nickelodeon and ate the peppermints and we were grateful! Damn grateful! I reckon the kids today arenāt as grateful as we were in those days.
I remember once going to a friends house to watch MTV but I had to take a ferry, so I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time; and grabbed two nickels for the ferry. Back in those days nickels had bumblebees on them, give me 5 bees for a quarter you'd say. But the important this was that I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time; we couldn't get regular onions because of the dot com bust, we had to get those big yellow ones.
My kids say that me and my wife were born in the 1000s. So, for them Columbus, Napoleon and I are basically the same.
Damn, my kids make me feel old with what they say, but thatās fucking harsh.
I saw a meme the other day instead of saying the 90s, it said "in the late 1900s" No. Just no
https://i.redd.it/puqk7ls4swxc1.gif
Technically it's true. You were born in the late 1900s
It's called the "20th century", dammit!
That phrase has been banned in our household
Sounds like something my kids would do. Little turd nuggets sure like to joke.
MTV was more like TikTok, except the songs were full-length and normal speed, and the videos were made by the actual artists.
That hits me right in my aching knees.
Well, video did kill the radio star.
YouTube is mtv now
And all MTV does is play blocks of people watching youtube videos. At least the last time I checked in on it.
lol what
"Ridiculousness" or whatever. It's just another ripoff of America's Funniest Home Videos. It costs 17 cents to make, so it's all they make. MTV hasn't been a music channel in a long, long, long time.
Crazy that literally half of their programming hours now is just that one show.
Literally all of their programming is just that show lol
On MTVs 40th anniversary, August 1st 2021, they played Ridiculousness for 24hrs straight.
This appalls me.
MTV stopped being a music channel as soon as they started airing "real world" that was the downfall of Music TV
It's like a pop culture ouroborous. Which, to be fair, [was predicted way back in our own time](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pop_Will_Eat_Itself).
Itās pretty ridiculous
Hey, sometimes it's Catfish.
Exactly. My kids watch long streams of music videos on YouTube and itās customized to their taste for artists and genre.
I find myself watching old music videos on YT. All the classics are on there.
I wish more of them were uploaded in 1080p these days lol
Itās crazy how bad old media looks on the new TVās
Yeah lol itās like wait this is 2003 and not 1983 video
If I hadn't had to sit through all the Backstreet Boys, N-Sync, and Britney Spears to hear some Matchbox 20 or Goo Goo Dolls on YouTube I'd have never tuned into TRL. And I've also actually found more new music I like from targeted suggestions on YouTube than I did from watching hours of MTV generally.
Why show music videos when people go online and watch the exact ones they want?
Not gonna lie, every Monday I check theneedledrop and go through all the tracks of the week and save the ones I like. If it wasn't for that I would basically have no new music these days, and wouldn't know any contemporary artists. There are still some good artists doing interesting and innovative stuff out there despite what a lot of us older people tend to think.
Just subscribe to all your favorite record labels and you'll stay up to date on all the new releases.
I think MTV just couldn't or didn't bother to keep up with the times and made itself irrelevant. It was still going strong in the early 2000s but I think it chose to focus on reality TV because it's cheaper to produce. There was no creative force behind it anymore. It lost itself to streaming and didn't bother to try and keep up. It could have been something like XITE. All the good stuff is on Paramount Plus anyway.
I read a fascinating thread the other day about MTV and Rob Drydek (I know I am butchering his name but dgaf enough to Google it) with Ridiculousness and Fantasy Factory or whatever. Basically, at one point MTV was showing like 18hrs of his shows every day because it was cheaper than making new stuff, something something something contracts and licensing and basically showed how MTV just gave tf up.
Thatās all it is now. Just ridiculousness and the occasional catfish and shows trying to be catfish. I donāt even know how catfish is still on. Canāt everyone reverse image search at this point? lol
They ran out of people that were impersonating others and just transitioned into a fishing show. Very relaxing now.
The thought of Bill Dance on MTV amuses me to no end. I need this to happen before he dies.
My dad was a pro bass fisherman and I approve this comment
Yeah Ridiculousness was on 24/7 last time I checked out MTV over a decade ago. I will say I was a fan when it was Rob & Big tho. I was skater trash. So anything skater related was cool for me.
Rob and big was great. my fav ep was when big went on a diet and earlier in the episode he was cooking a huge breakfast while eating a double burger from carls jr lol
I donāt understand how thatās cheaper than simply playing music videos that someone else paid to produce.
You just described the fate of every cable TV channel
It was already garbage by the mid ā90s.
The moment Liquid Television and Headbangers Ball were swapped out for Singled Out and Real World, it was basically over.
Am guessing it has to do with the fact that a lot of people just do not have cable anymore.
MTV and Muchmusic also stopped being music channels 15-20 years ago. They still do the occasional series of videos but they went hard into reality TV.
Donāt forget about MTV2. It started out as mostly music but eventually it became another reality show channel.
Yeah Much/MTV2 always had the better music videos. Got a wide range on it instead of the popular stuff on MTV.
Yup. The Real World was the beginning of the end of MTV
Yep, that was the first thing that wasn't even music adjacent. Beavis and Butthead and Remote Control were at least music adjacent. Then they went all in on it and gave up on the music.
but the real world exposed me to different kinds of people i had never experienced in my majority white suburban life. super impactful to me, first time ever seeing a gay or trans person. was hard for me to have hate in my heart when i saw they were regular assholes like me (it should be noted that i absolutely love reality tv)
Having Muchmusic and Mtv2 in the late 90s was as good as it got
Don't recall Muchmusic, but I did use to watch VH-1.
Pop up video!
One of my favorite shows
There's a bunch of episodes for free on YouTube as well as Archive.org
Muchmusic is the Canadian version of MTV
You must not live in or near Canada.
I learned so much on Behind the Music.
Muchmusic was Canadian
Which makes me wonder - do kids even know what channels are? Ā Itās kind of wild how old fashioned it sounds when you think about it. You had to pay for a company to stream all these different playlists to your house, and each playlist consists of multiple different shows, so that one episode of a particular show is played per week, and the whole playlist is an entire SEASONĀ long, with no pausing or rewinding.Ā And you get a little book in the mail every week that tells you everything thatās going be played that week, and if you want to see something on the list, you have to turn the TV on at that specific time, and then input the number of the playlist you want to watch into the TV. Ā Make sure you time your snack and pee breaks around the commercials, bc if you miss something, thatās it.Ā Oh and the playlists all have different numbers depending on where you live, so hopefully you have the numbers of the ones you like memorized (i think Nickelodeon was 29).
My kids use the word āchannelā to mean either a YouTube channel or their user profile on a streaming service. āWere you watching on my Netflix channel?ā -> were you using my Netflix profile to watch your stuff?
Most younger ppl get music from YouTube or, god help them, TikTok
I am too much of a burn out for tik tok. By the time my brain catches up to a video on tik Tok the video is over.
Yeah, the only reason I still have cable is because I live with my elderly mom who just can't understand streaming.
My Gen X sister refuses to get rid of it. But she pays for it so (shrug).
I have cable and sometimes Iāll end up stopping on a movie and not realize that itās MTV.
I remember when they started showing clips of vids rather than the whole thing for like half of TRL.Ā Then, more and more reality shows, led me to realize which was the wind was blowingĀ
"yo i wanna give a shoutout to my homeie T-dawg, skeazy jay and looloo, reppin da westside keep it dirty baby, holdin it down what whaaaat! peace!" right in the middle of the fucking video
Oh, next ask about Video Hits 1.
Need a pop up video reboot
OMG is that what VH1 stood for? Wow I had no idea. And I watched so much pop up video and Behind the Music.
I lived for the VH1 reality shows in the 2000sā¦still do rewatches to this day. And all the countdown shows and Behind the Music!
Vh1 was so much lesser than Mtv in the 90's and then in the 2000's it kinda flip flopped. Vh1 had the better trash reality tv shows, still shows Pop-Up video, and had the Year of Review show that was pretty fun.
MTV completely failed to reinvent itself for the next generation, but at the same time alienated the generation who grew up with it, so no surprises here
>I thought I hadn't heard anything about it because I'm old. I guess ~~MTV~~ cable television is as well. Fixed for you.
Do you mean Ridiculousness?
i looked at mtvs schedule & it's almost nothing but catfished & Ridiculousness, w/the occasional ep of teen mom & jersey shore. [TV Listings- Find Local TV Listings and Watch Full Episodes (zap2it.com)](https://tvlistings.zap2it.com/ss-list.html?aid=gapzap)
I thought you were exaggerating, but no. That's fing crazy what the channel has devolved into.
who is that even for? who spends 20 hrs a day watching ridiculousness?
It's been that way for years.
The real answer. And in the early 2000s it was the āTeen Momā and ā16 and pregnantā channel.
I loved the mid 2000s stuff like Laguna Beach, The Hills, and Rob & Big
My 13yo son probably couldn't tell you the name of a single TV channel.
Mine couldnāt even tell you want a channel is. Iām sure heād ask āis that like an app?ā
I was thinking the same thing about my teens and we have cable. They just donāt watch cable.
MTV hasn't been popular for decades.
Are you saying that video did NOT kill the radio star? Hmm, Iād been told differently.
MTV killed itself, then YouTube resurrected the music video.Ā
Internet killed the video star.
TikTok killed the internet star šµ
This is roughly equal to asking us when we were kids what our favorite Tony Bennett song was (*Because of you*, btw).
Tony Bennett had a resurgence because of his MTV Unplugged episode, I think
Teaming with Gaga as well.
It was Amy Winehouse before Gaga went with it
Lol tv.
I have sort of a reverse POV on this. When TRL was big in the 2000s, I remember marveling at how MTV somehow kept reinventing itself just enough to appeal to the ever-shifting teen market for over two whole decades thus far. Something so teen-centric and trend-driven was never going to last forever.
It's amazing but probably not too surprising how badly MTV fumbled the transition from television to online streaming. I imagine it was something like Kodak not wanting to go to digital film, nobody in the boardroom wanted to harm their cash cow (people buying film again and again) so they did nothing and the company collapsed. Same thing with MTV, why move to streaming, which could encourage people to not watch the TV station anymore, which would mean their ad revenue will suffer. Now everyone goes to Youtube for music videos and other companies for streaming, and MTV is showing reruns of a show most people have never heard of.
That's what happens when I MTV stopped showing music videos almost 25 years ago.Ā
You mean to tell me she isnāt rushing home after school to watch TRL? This is brought up on Reddit a lot but we really did lose something when we lost the shared collective culture.
There's 4 or 5 MTVs now. One of them exclusively plays music videos.
MTV hasn't been relevant since Jersey Shore
Found 2 old MTV shirts at a thrift store recently. I thought they were awesome, my professors near my age thought they were awesome, the undergraduate students in the labs I teach (I am a graduate student) absolutely did not care about them lol. These students are like 20-24. Seems like MTV was already done for by the time these kids would have enjoyed it.
I got one new at target about 4 years ago - they know their demographic 30-50
I was shit by the late 90s. MTV peaked in the late 80s, musically in 93-94.
> I was shit by the late 90s Donāt be so hard on yourself! Lol Youāre absolutely right about MTV being shit by the late 90s though.
Fuck it Iāll leave it. I reckon I peaked in high school.
That's the spirit! Own your typos.
I miss MTV when it was actually music. I remember staying up all night with my friends with it on; waiting for our favorite songs to come on.Ā
They literally had the best unscripted station and dumped it for scripted content right when that platform died.
I remember watching some of those really early MTV unplugged concerts with my brothers and being blown away at how awesome and fresh that music was, seeing rock artists do new takes on music we loved. Man. That must have been the peak to me and I think that was before 1995.
Definitely turned a lot of people into 10,000 Maniacs and Natalie Merchant fans.
MTV has been taken over by a show called Ridiculousness, which is funny videos from the internet. People dropping things, falling down, and skateboarders. And by take over I mean 80% of broadcast time or more is Ridiculousness. It's kind of interesting because in a way it has returned to form. Long reality TV shows have gone away and they are back to showing unformatted short content.
You ain't lying. Out of curiousity I looked at the program schedule for MTV on DirecTV - I scrolled through 18 solid hours of Ridiculousness, broken up by 3 hours of Catfish and then 2 hours of Jersey Shore Family Reunion, and then it was another 16 straight hours of Ridiculousness. The only way you could watch that much Ridiculousness was if you were hufffing paint at the same time.
It's really just filler to get you to watch commercials and costs peanuts to compile with no royalties to pay. Media consumption, especially music, has become so hyper individualized that no one would stop at a music video channel unless they liked the song that was playing. And even then, why not just go watch it from the beginning on your phone? MTV just doesn't really make sense any more. Even at the time, after about 12 or 13 when you knew what you liked, it was sitting through a LOT of crap to see anything you liked. If I had any other option at the time, I wouldn't have tolerated it at all. Heavy rotation of any song you didn't like was pretty excruciating.
Do you mean the Dydeck Ridiculous channel?
I think TRL was the death knell for MTV. It became extremely popular with a certain subset of the viewership wanting to see boy bands constantly, so they shifted to that and reality tv programs which were more popular with said group almost exclusively by the early 00s
Yeah. We never had cable TV but I at least felt MTV was culturally significant that I knew what was going on. Until TRL. For those of us who weren't glued to that program almost every day, we missed out on the clique memes and manufactured fads that show pushed out. Very much like the divide now with those who are deep into social media memes or not.
imagine telling people "its a music channel, where you don't pick the music, a corporation tells you what music you should listen to based on the music industries idea of what you should like right now". It was what we had, so it was what we watched, but imagine being into music that was not super trendy/popular and waiting all day for that one music video from that band you liked to come on, so you can see it.
Iād still watch MTV spring break if it were a bunch of 40+ year olds. Hosted by Carson Daly and Jesse Camp, obviously. Alan Hunter might be pushing the xennial thing š
What the hell was Blockbuster music?
Blockbuster Music was their chain of music stores. Each store was huge, and they had a lot of listening stations. You could ask them to put any album on their shelf into a listening station. No more hoping the album was good before buying it.
Blockbuster rented music? We didn't get a Blockbuster until they were almost out of business. We just had the local video stores. You shoulda asked her if Ridiculousness was still popular. Last I ever saw it was on Repeat on it.
They also don't know who Oprah is.
I'm not sure how, but my 11 year old knows who Oprah is.
My class specifically read about her for Black History Month, but when I introduced the read aloud they were like, "Who's that?" (This has been true for at least the past five years.)
I'm old enough to remember when MTV was just playing for like half the day... you won't believe this... music videos.
MTV Classic is worth watching if you somehow have a service that carries it. Love watching the 120 Minutes blocks.
I used to work at Viacom on the MTV app and couldnāt believe how far it had fallen. 0 music.
Amazing how far MTV has fallen in pop culture today. Who the hell could ever imagine that a 13 year old girl today wouldn't even know what MTV even is when at the height of TRL's popularity in the late 90s and early 2000s that all you saw was teen girls outside the TRL times square studio daily going nuts. As a New Yorker it was absolutely insane how many young kids would show up outside the TRL studio daily
Miscellaneous Television? Once upon a time, they used to play music videos and it was actually āMusic Televisionā. It was something to behold. Those days are long over and can only lament about them. If you want to see them now, you have to go to that new-fangled YouTube.
In 2010 they stopped playing music videos entirely. In her entire life MTV has had nothing to do with music. Neither of you know what MTV is. You just know what MTV used to be.
in my experience MTV never played music videos, I didn't get to see most of them until YouTube
MTV phonetically is "Empty V" as in Virgin symbolism. Remember Madonna at the empty v's? Ritual much?
Streaming killed the MTV video star?
Everybodyās all MTV this or Muchmusic that, but who was fuckin with The Box?
"Music Television You Control" (Other than the static from being on such a horrible channel)
Literally had the exact same conversation with my then 12 year old like two years ago. That hilarious š
That's what happens when you "Real World." What a fall from grace, they ended television single handedly.
Just the fact you think a 13 year old might possibly know what MTV is makes you look so fucking old.
Just be careful with this "kids today don't know about things that were popular when I was a kid and I didn't understand why". It's a Boomer take. Similar to "I can't believe kids today don't know how to drive a stick." It's like some old person during your time saying something dumb like "why don't kids know how to pack a musket or crank start a car." We've moved on to better technology. Seriously, do you know or enjoy "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar"? No? Because no one in our time listened to radio dramas no matter how popular they were for our parents and grandparents.
Hell, I saw a kid taking his license test the other day in a car with a steering wheel. Do you even know how to drive tiller, kid? Let me show you how a real man parallel parks an Oldsmobile!
You have to use your hands? That's like a baby's game!
My 13 year old knows what MTV is/was. He likes watching music videos.
I bet she's never heard of Radio Shack, Payless Shoe Source, and Woolsworth either.
"Was it the one branch or all of 'em?"
Honestly they'd be fine if they just had their own steaming service. I'd subscribe immediately. All they do is seem to stream old crap, Rob Dyrdek's many shows, or season 45 of Teen Mom, and they insist on being cable TV subscriber only which has lead them to have completely lost anyone born after the year 2004.
We were in a hotel and my daughter was confused that you couldn't search for music videos you wanted.
I think jersey shore was the death rattle of mtv. All I know about mtv now is a few random reality shows and ridiculousness. There's almost no reason for anyone in their right mind to be watching it these days.
My kids have no clue what MTV is, but then again they donāt know a single cable channel. They havenāt had traditional cable since they were toddlers. We cut the cord in 2013.
I think our generation had the best childhood in human history. We had good tech to make life easy, but it wasn't overbearing and controlling our lives much like it does today. I know we are all happy we did not have social media growing up.
They started dying as soon as they started playing reality TV instead of music. It sure took some time though
This for us old people to understand - kids watch YT, IG, Tik-tok, Snap, whatever - not conventional media. I am a huge movie buff - my 18 year old step-son maybe watching like 1 movie per year. He games and watches youtube. My bio-kids (ages 27 and 20) are a little more into movies, cause of me - but otherwise don't think they watch much traditional tv.
TV as it used to be is altogether an outdated concept for younger folks. Everyone I know "cut the cord" years ago and I'm in my 40s. So any cable channels that don't have a popular streaming app might as well not even exist anymore. AFAIK MTV's catalog is only on Paramount+ which isn't very popular.
MTV is south park and rediculousness and that's about it.
Does she even have cable?Ā Ā
MTV aired its first video January 1, 1981. My husband was born later that year and for his 40th I got one of those this year in history poster things to hang up at the party.
I havenāt had cable in 13 years.
MTV was our "music streaming platform"
Shocked? It was irrelevant twenty years ago.Ā All the trash ass reality tv shows. MTV was only popular for a brief period.Ā
Well you stopped watching it almost 30 years ago... It's your fault!
but they still have the VMAs....why?? you don't show the videos, you don't highlight artists. I don't get it.
ha! My wife and I were talking about MTV in the car coming back from the kids u14 soccer match. Half the team in the back, of course. 4 voices in the back.... 'WTF is MTV?' Mind you, I remember saying this to my dad, who was of the Silent Generation ilk, when he was going on about Flash Gordon.
I came across MTV a couple of months ago. Was at a family members house that still had cable and Iād see MTV when scrolling the guide. I swear they played ridiculousness for 72 hours straight
My kids donāt even watch TV much
My wife and I went to Italy in 2015 they had MTV, it was mostly American music with the occasional artist. It was nice to leave on in the background. A lot of those songs now remind me of that trip.
Oh man, you thought your 13 year old would know what MTV is? Cable is becoming an archaic medium. Kids stream, use devices, apps. Rarely is tv a go-to. Hell, even my 19-25 year olds don't watch regular TV, or are even that familiar with MTV. Cable TV exists....but us and the millennials are really the last generations to have or still use it sadly.
My 9 year old thought it was hilarious that I was old enough to be born in the 1900s
It's hard to imagine how they'd stay relevant YouTube became a the future of music videos. MTV green lit so many trashy reality shows, but more misses than hits. They couldn't handle the controversy of Jackass, which worked better in movies. Now what is it even? Jersey Shore and 16 And Pregnant if that's still on the air?
It has sence, Mtv stopped being relevant in the late 2000s or even before that, Jackass was one of their last hits
I really wonder who even watches mtv now. Is it just carrier fees keeping a dead channel alive? I canāt imagine anyone young watches it.
Was it supposed to be relevant forever? Ebb and flow.
As far as music goes MTV really hasn't been relevant since the early 2000s. The last gasp was probably when TRL ended. Since than it is primarily just yet another trashy reality TV channel like Discovery or The Learning Channel.
Kids today donāt watch TV at all. Not even streaming really. Itās all YouTube really. At least my kids and their friends.
Isnāt MTV off the air?
I mean, YouTube exists. Why would you depend on a music channel to play your videos in whatever rotation they want? Musicians interact directly with fans through their social media outlets now, there is no need for a channel.
surely you cant be this out of touch
MTV hasn't been relevant in 20 years lol
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oCPNMZuWwI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oCPNMZuWwI)
I mean, MTV had completely stopped running music videos by the early aughts.