In particular, they slammed MTV for excluding African American artists. MTV’s Segregated PastĪs MTV’s popularity and viewership increased, critics began to attack it. In markets where MTV wasn’t available, Pittman ran ads urging viewers to call their cable companies and say “I want my MTV!” Thousands of fans did just that, and by 1983, MTV was available in most areas from New York to Los Angeles. Stores reported that albums by groups like Duran Duran and the Stray Cats – artists with limited radio play – were flying off shelves simply because their videos were on MTV. The result: in every market where MTV was shown, record sales went up. He also wanted the station’s IDs to be unique Pittman felt that viewers should never turn to MTV and confused about what they were watching. His target audience was under 30, so he hired flashy design houses to create ads to appeal to those viewers. For his part, Pittman pushed hard to make the station unique. The first video: the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.”Īt that time, the station only had about 125 videos, but within months, MTV was the most-watched cable network that Warner owned. It was a good deal for Warner: The record companies provided the videos at their own cost, so the station’s content was basically free. Warner execs loved the idea and gave him the green light, and on August 21, 1981, at one minute past midnight, MTV debuted. In 1979 he got a job with the Warner Satellite Entertainment Company, and the following year he pitched the idea of a station that aired videos produced by record companies. Among its 30 channels, Qube had several unique ones: Star, which would go on to become The Movie Channel Pinwheel which would become Nickelodeon, and Sight on Sound, which featured concert footage and other types of music programming.Ī former disc jockey and radio program director for New York’s WNBC, Bob Pittman, noticed how popular Qube was in its local market and used some of Qubes concepts on a local New York TV show called Album Tracks. In 1977 a cable system called Qube debuted in Ohio. But it would be another 30 years before music videos got their own TV station. Most of these early videos aired on music TV shows like Shindig and Hullabaloo. With musical variety shows like The Ed Sullivan Show playing for free, why would anyone waste a dime on a Panoram? By the mid-1960s, bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had begun producing film clips of their songs to promote their albums. Then a repairman had to be called in to fix it.īut it was the advent of television after World War II that really led to the decline of soundies. Other issues were technical: The reels didn’t last very long and the Panoram’s mechanics were unreliable – often, the reel wouldn’t slip into the correct playing position and would instead be thrown off balance inside the machine. There were a few problems though: Viewers couldn’t choose which video they wanted to see (the way they could choose songs in a jukebox) because the reel just ran continuously. Patrons could drop a dime in a Panoram – a video jukebox with a small viewing screen – and watch a soundie. Eight to ten three-minute soundies from different artists fit on a single film reel, which would be sent to diners, bars, and nightclubs all over the country. The first soundies appeared in 1940, and all the big singing stars and bandleaders recorded them: Bing Crosby, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington, even Lawrence Welk. The earliest ancestor of the modern music video was the soundie, a black-and-white 16mm film recording of a musician performing before a live audience.
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