03: I Want My MTV

Matthew Billy (0:00)

It's hard to believe, but before 1981, hardly anyone watched music videos. In fact, most people didn't even know what they were. It's not that music wasn't on TV, it was, but it was packaged in the form of variety shows like Ed Sullivan, where the music act was sprinkled in amongst magicians, trained seals, plate spinners, and other bizarre performers. Some shows, like American Bandstand, played music for a full hour and featured dancers in the hippest outfits grooving to the latest hit songs. These shows were music shows, but they were not music videos. The closest thing that came to a music video was when an actual band or a singer was invited onto one of these shows to perform a song for three and a half minutes. This was one of the rare occasions when a teenager was able to actually see the musicians they idolized. They weren't just interested in hearing the band's latest hit song, they could hear that on the radio. With TV, a teen could observe how their idols dressed, did their hair, moved around. It was a window into the artist's personality, or in some cases, attitudes. Those three and a half minutes once a week weren't much, but teens lived for them. It defined the way they spoke and lived and acted and what kind of jobs they took. The adults running the television networks didn't understand this. They didn't believe people would watch an hour long music show that didn't have dancers and hip outfits, let alone an entire network of only music videos. But there were a few adults, just when cable TV was beginning its growth spurt, who were still young enough to remember being glued to that TV once a week for those three and a half minutes. They knew teenagers wanted more, because they did too. They knew that if this crazy idea for an all music cable channel was going to work, it wouldn't be because the television executives were clever. It would be because teenagers, without even knowing it at the time, already wanted their MTV.

Hi, I'm Matthew Billy, and this is Between the Liner Notes, a podcast about music, why it is the way it is, and how it got to be that way. As a disclaimer, this episode contains some words you can't say on the radio, so if you have young children around, you may want to listen to this episode at another time. Cable television began in the United States in 1948, but it didn't really begin to grow until the 1970s, when the federal government began to relax regulations and allow cable networks to create their own unique programming. Unlike their broadcast network rivals who aired a wide variety of shows, these new cable networks broadcast only one very specific type of programming. HBO aired only movies, CNN only news, The Weather Channel only weather, and ESPN only sports. And Retrospect, a channel that aired only music videos should have been obvious. But it's not that simple. Today, we have hundreds of cable channels. But back in 1980, even with all those specialized channels, there were only 28 networks and plenty of room in the transmission system for more. This extra room presented an opportunity for a media company to create more channels and make huge profits off of the distribution fees and the advertising. Two companies in particular who had very little in common wanted to get in on the cable gold rush. Warner Brothers Entertainment, a media conglomerate, and American Express, a credit card company, decided to form a very unlikely alliance. Each invested $75 million into a joint venture that was given the mission of creating new cable networks.

Fred Seibert (3:25)

The company was called Warner AmEx Satellite Entertainment. It was a joint venture between Warner Communications and American Express.

Matthew Billy (3:33)

That's Fred Seibert, MTV's original head of program services.

Fred Seibert (3:37)

And their mission was that in this new form of distribution, satellite television distribution, there wasn't enough programming to go out on the satellite, and they decided that they would get that programming. They hired a guy called Bob Pitman, who had been a top radio programmer in New York at WNBC's AM radio station. He told me that the company was actually going to start like up to 10 different channels that were specialist channels, but the one that he was really interested in was music. I said, well, I'm a music guy, so that's great.

Matthew Billy (4:14)

Bob Pitman had a long history of programming rock and roll stations. When the Warner MX Satellite Entertainment Company, also known as WOSEC, decided to hire Pitman, he borrowed all the strategies he learned from radio and applied them to the first channel he was placed in charge of, the movie channel. He began measuring viewers' tastes by gathering call-out data, fine-tuning how often a movie would air, gauging how quickly a movie would burn out and then should be retired from rotation. These strategies worked and viewership of the movie channel went up. Next, Pitman wanted to copy his success at the music channel. He wanted to take these videos record labels were making and air them on a 24-7 music video network. Labels were not making many of these videos and when they were, it was usually to promote an artist overseas.