MTV = Reality TV Programming | YouTube = Music Videos

MTV is a shadow of it's former self. It's morphed from a once music television station to something else called reality television-where nothing is real and everything reeks of fake-authenticity. If you're looking for music videos, go to YouTube. I recently posted how YouTube is preserving music history, but equally important, YouTube has overtaken MTV as the best place to locate your favorite music video(s).

Want to remember what MTV used to be like? Insert irony here. 

Below are some of the top all time videos, take notice that over 2/3 of the top 15 videos are related to music. It makes perfect sense this no longer belongs to MTV. People used to congregate around the TV to watch the top ten list to see a video at a specific time. Recall there were actual premieres of videos? Remember Michael Jackson's Thriller? I would love to see how many times the Thriller video would have been watched if YouTube had been around--not to mention 25 years later it has over 37-million views. Were YouTube around then, Thriller would be the first video to hit a billion views.  We're a now society and MTV just can't deliver it in the old format, nor do they (even) try. 

I don't watch MTV or one of their subsequent channels.They used to be the middle ware between music, music videos and their audience. We're a right now culture. MTV doesn't have a right to own the audience any longer where you wait for videos. However, I do think they jumped ship pretty quickly. At last memory, the last time I remember an actual music video on MTV when channel surfing is somewhere around 1996. You can call it forward thinking or you can call it the adoption of Jerry Springer mentality: Create the lowest common denominator of programming and watch viewers flock. While I recognize they had to change their model for a lot of reasons, MTV today reminds me of watching Jefferson Airplane morph into Jefferson Starship--you just don't recognize it any longer. 

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