The Birth of Music Television
At the start of the 1980s, the music industry was in a slump. Rock radio had ossified into an AOR format dominated by a canon of “classic” rock artists and increasingly rejected musical innovation for fear of losing core suburban listeners. As radio slowed, so did the public’s access to new music, resulting in a 10.2% drop in revenue for the industry in 1979 (Cocks 57). By 1982 profits fell to $4.6 billion from the $5.1 billion industry peak in 1978 (Starr and Waterman 450). Despite these statistics, the first years of the 80s also witnessed an unprecedented phenomenon taking place in seemingly random suburbs across America. In places like Tulsa, Oklahoma and Lowell, Massachusetts people were showing up in droves to purchase obscure records from British bands with strange hair. In Rob Tannenbaum’s and Craig Marks’ oral history titled I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, Def Leppard’s manager, Cliff Bernstein, spoke about being puzzled that the band’s financially disappointing 1981 album High ‘n’ Dry had overperformed in Lowell and Tulsa. He learned that “MTV had come” to these cities and “had been playing ‘Bringin’ On the Heartbreak’ in substantial rotation” (Tannenbaum and Marks 50). The importance of music videos to the music industry’s revival in the mid-80s as well as to more general cultural trends throughout the decade cannot be overstated. That being said, MTV was not a revolutionary invention based on any notions of cultural consciousness but rather an amalgam of various industry trends and commercial interests channeled through a cable network that wasn’t initially available in any major city.
A glance at the industrial history of MTV reveals that the network, while certainly unorthodox, was a decidedly corporate endeavor largely based on market research. While some of the people associated with the birth of the network, like John Lack and Fred Seibert, were genuinely interested in music, the primary motivator driving the creation of a 24-hour video music channel was the impending deregulation of the cable industry by the Reagan administration. It is important to note that despite the Reagan administration’s promise of freer markets in the wake of deregulation, the resulting market was defined by transnational corporate consolidation and little room for smaller-scale operations. It is somewhat ironic that MTV, perhaps the most “revolutionary” thing on television, wasn’t some renegade operation blasting on UHF but rather was just another branch of a massive media conglomerate.
According to James D. Robinson III, CEO of American Express (Amex), Amex was interested in Warner Cable’s QUBE remote, which could be used in the comfort of one’s home to shop via television. The two companies merged into Warner Amex Cable Communications and later “split into two divisions: Warner Amex Cable Company, which built local cable systems; and Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, or WASEC, which created and supplied programming, and was run by Jack Schneider” (Tannenbaum and Marks 15). Schneider, already in charge of The Movie Channel and Nickelodeon, was convinced that cable would thrive on the concept of narrowcasting. Narrowcasting is literally the antithesis of broadcasting and is described by Tannenbaum and Marks as “a way of targeting a specific demographic and selling your popularity within that audience to advertisers, rather than aiming for the largest possible audience” (xlii). MTV co-founder Bob Pittman illustrates this concept in his interview by explaining that Schneider “decided that the world of cable TV was going to be all about specialized networks. Radio was a good model for that, so they wanted a radio programmer to work on The Movie Channel, which was the first twenty-four-hour movie service” (Tannenbaum and Marks 15). While this seems like a great concept on its head, cable programmers would be able to cater to niche audiences without fear of becoming as bland as network fare, the resulting model of transmission ended up being more constricting than anything else. It was out of this mindset that MTV’s AOR format was birthed.
