On Aug. 1, MTV will kiss its teen years goodbye with a slew of promotional specials that track the station’s rise from an obscure upstart to its current dominant role in music and popular culture. There is certainly plenty of ground to cover. MTV not only changed the way we listen to music, but the station turbocharged the careers of icons such as Madonna and Michael Jackson, inspired fashion trends (remember the Hammer flattop?) and even influenced the way movies and TV programs are made (its “Real World” series was a reality-TV pioneer). From the chortling idiocy of Beavis and Butt-head to the appeal of MTV’s ever-morphing logo and eye-popping graphics, the Viacom-owned station’s presence is now ubiquitous.
Its business track record is just as impressive. Last year revenues for MTV Networks, a business that now includes MTV2, VH1, Nickelodeon/Nick at Nite, TV Land, TNN and CMT, were $3.04 billion, almost triple the revenues in 1995. In the all-important ratings race, MTV is now the No. 1 cable network for the influential 12- to 24-year-old demographic, largely due to the success of the prime-time show “TRL.” MTV is viewed in 342 million households worldwide, quite a leap from 1 million viewers in 1981.
But not everyone is feeling the love for MTV. Critics say the secret to its success is the result of a Faustian bargain, where the station sacrificed its initial credibility to cater to teens’ most immediate and banal tastes. MTV’s main-attraction artists are now bubblegum poppers like Britney Spears and ‘N Sync, while its most popular shows consist of teens voting (and woohing) for their favorite videos, singing karaoke-style over hits and being made over into their favorite pop stars. Its prime-time hours (from 3:30 p.m. until dinner time) are filled with this fare, not to mention nonstop T&A in videos and beach-house specials, while more edgy artists are relegated to off-peak viewing hours or the smaller satellite station, MTV2. “It would be nice if MTV’s music programming was as risk-taking as the people who run it,” says former news anchor Tabitha Soren, who was at the station from 1991 to 1998. “It would be nice if their programming was more diverse. MTV now has enough power and has shown how irreverent and how creative it can be, so they should distinguish their programming from radio programming.”
Even MTV’s most famous in-house personality, master of ceremonies and latter-day Dick Clark, Daly, concedes that to stay on top of the heap, you must put your love for music aside and think about the all-mighty numbers. “Once you make music your business, there’s no room for a polarized philosophy,” says Daly. “I don’t have time to be opinionated. I have a show to host and produce. It’s like I’m a bartender: someone wants a Zima, and I might think it’s kind of an iffy drink, but you know what? I’m gonna give it to him in a cold glass and hope he gives me a nice tip.”
The very mind-set that frustrates hardcore music fans has made MTV one of the few music stations to stay consistently on top of fickle, teenage tastes. Since its inception in 1981, MTV’s been able to jump from trend to trend–be it early-’80s new wave, late-’80s hair metal or early-’90s grunge and gangsta rap–and reinvent itself for each era. “Music television is a term that has to be redefined for each generation,” says president of programming Brian Graden, who was instrumental in the station’s recent shift toward teen pop. “You have to find new ways to package it, celebrate it, reinvent it, or somebody else would create tomorrow’s music television.”
MTV’s last big moment of reinvention came with the advent of the Backstreet Boys. It was 1996, and the station was in a ratings slump because grunge had finally hit the skids, and hip-hop had yet to take over as a dominant ratings force. “I remember going to a meeting that year where they told us we were going after cutting-edge, freethinking, revolutionary minds,” says Soren, who helped build MTV’s credibility in the early ’90s by producing smart, in-depth documentaries and covering the 1992 presidential elections. “But six months later we were told, ‘Forget all that. Thirteen-year-olds are buying records. Britney Spears is gonna be the hottest thing since sliced bread. That’s gonna be our base.’ It was just this total flip.” It’s a turn of events that even the 19-year-old singer still finds hard to believe. “Oh, my goodness,” says Spears. “I owe a lot of my success to MTV. I was really a nobody and they were playing my video like I was the most popular thing in the world. It was really, really sweet.”
So sweet, in fact, that kids gobbled it up like candy. And movie and consumer-products marketers, desperate to tap the largest U.S. teen population on record (there are 31.6 million 12- to 19-year-olds in the United States, 65 percent of whom have TV sets in their own rooms), were willing to pay from $10,000 to $20,000 for a 30-second advertising slot. “If you’re targeting young people, MTV has to be part of your strategy,” says an ad buyer with one of MTV’s top clients. “They know it too, and that tends to make them difficult to deal with. They have a very take-it-or-leave-it attitude.”
Smaller advertisers and labels often complain that there is nowhere else to go since MTV purchased the Box three years ago and made it part of MTV2. “It’s a monopoly, like Ticketmaster,” says Jim DeRogatis, a former Rolling Stone editor and music critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. “If you want to rock on television, you can only go to MTV. You wanna buy a ticket to Madison Square Garden, you gotta go to Ticketmaster. It’s the antithesis of everything that is rock and roll.” But Kurt Loder, the station’s news anchor for 13 years, does not see his mother ship as such an insidious entity. “MTV serves the purpose that ‘American Bandstand’ did,” says Loder. “It reflects whatever’s going on in pop culture at the moment. And if you like the moment, you’re gonna like MTV. And if you don’t, well, this too shall pass.”
Still, many industry insiders feel the rolling-with-the-tides philosophy is a cop-out for a station that was once daring enough to break revolutionary artists like Public Enemy and Nirvana. They say it’s a bittersweet irony that many of the people behind what they view as today’s most goofy programming are, at heart, risk-takers and highly creative thinkers. “Everybody there is really cool,” says a source at one of the most successful independent labels in the business. “So you think that all the lame decisions must be happening above them. But you go up and up and up [in the company’s leadership] and everyone’s still really cool. So who is it? Who’s gonna get mad at [president of the MTV Group] Judy McGrath if she tosses in a Badly Drawn Boy video after midnight?”
To its credit, the station does offer up some edgier side ventures. MTV2, the behemoth’s baby-sister station, is a bone tossed to disgruntled music lovers. It offers 24-hour video programming of artists like Mos Def and Bjork and is what McGrath refers to as a “woo-free zone.” The network also points with pride to its Internet sites, MTV.com and MTV2.com, where fans can listen to music by a wide array of artists. In the end, this is all part of an attempt to widen the network’s appeal, and a pre-emptive strike of sorts: MTV knows better than anyone that current pop trends will change, and with these alterna-outlets, it can still maintain that it has one foot outside the world of mainstream pop. “It’s good to keep all your windows and doors open,” says McGrath.
The winds are already shifting. Record sales are down from last year, and the strong economy that’s been driving the teen-music boom is sagging. “As soon as the public gets tired of this stuff, MTV will move on to something else,” says Loder. “There is no loyalty in television.” For people like DeRogatis, it’s already too late. “The ‘TRL’ audience has been in a cocoon of creature comforts. But the economy is rapidly going in the toilet and the culture’s taking a turn to the right. It’s gonna be a bucket of ice water in the face, and to those kids, Eminem and Britney are not gonna be enough. I think they’re gonna be biting the hand that’s been feeding them all this crap.” But for now, the kids are still hungry for the taste of sugar, and MTV is happily serving.
