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It all began in the year 1981... when MTV launched in August 1981 and blasted “Video Killed The Radio Star” through North American households. It represented the ambitions of a company who wanted to significantly influence popular culture. In the first 18 months, the success was amazing, earning $7 million in revenue (at the time this was an amazing turnover). Music videos remained a critical part of the music industry by utilising music videos to help promote the image of acts as diverse as Michael Jackson and Green Day, Guns n’ Roses and 2Pac.
Nowadays, MTV have transformed more into a reality tv channel, however, they still promote music videos, and while doing so they have come under threat for being the leaders of the music video industry after the competition from VEVO.
However as the 90s rolled on, so did more issues for music and the music industry. Previously, music videos served as a mode of advertising, however after the introduction of downloading music FOR FREE was introduced to the world, there was a major decline in CD sales.
As a result of this major change in the music industry, MTV continued to expand, meanwhile this change was still occurring and music videos were constantly decreasing in time on the television. Shows like “The Real World”, which initially represented a unique portrait of real life, had devolved into “immature and irresponsible behaviour” that generated great ratings.
This led to what can only be called the dark years of music video. From 2000 through to 2005, there were first of all not many music videos made and second nowhere to really tune in and watch a whole lot of them. It seemed that MTV had made a wise choice by making reality tv shows which at this point were still not accessible on the internet. The majority of the music videos were available on DVDs such as “The Top 50 Music Videos Of All Time”. Overall at this point, it seemed that the music video industry was done for.
UNTIL!!! YouTube enters the internet industry. A service which came with millions and millions of opportunities and millions and millions of hours of content to keep the mainstream happy and content. Furthermore, conveniently for the music video industry, along came every music video ever to be made with it. Millions and millions of people consuming these media extracts by the second, with no revenue whatsoever being shared with the artist and the creators of the music videos (MTV).
For five years, YouTube and music industry companies like MTV struggled to understand how their content was being displayed for free on YouTube, and attempted to implement measures to ban the content. Any consumer could have told you that was a losing fight, as it was 10 companies vs. 150 million viewers a month watching 2 Billion video views daily, and the millions of people uploading the videos would be hard to censor. So eventually, YouTube realized that they may have a way to deliver some revenue to the music video creators, and YouTube (owned by Google) developed an algorithm to detect copyright material and then to display ads and pay the original creator. This has resulted in the total number of displayed YouTube Ads going up 50% in the last year and their revenues soaring to $450 million, while music video creators earn revenue too.
So where does that leave MTV? Well, the MTV online video site and it’s main competitor, Vevo, realized a few years ago that it was in their best interest to start focusing on showing music videos online, and have developed their properties and websites to be as smooth as possible. MTV.com gets around 53 million unique visitors a month and Vevo has around 50 million. These are pretty huge numbers, and they’ve been growing steadily, which hints at a resurgence of the power of the music video.
This is a modern music video that has gained over 400 million views since release and has given the musician more recognition, a greater following and also given the song more listeners which has resulted in more profit. This is why music videos are a marketing method.
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