Throwback Thursday- Music Video Era
Some of you may have watched the MTV Video Music Awards this past (Sunday 8/27), but a lot of you probably did not. The annual award show brought in the lowest ratings of it's history, only 5.4 million viewers. It has been on a decline for the last couple of years so it doesn't come as that big of a surprise. There may have been people streaming it online, but not as many as previous years. So what happened? My guess is a few factors, The Game of Thrones season finale was also on at the same time and the award show was being highly criticized from stars like Adam Levine who tweeted,
"It's always exciting to see how utterly horrible the VMAs will be. They really delivered so far this year. #HOLYFUCK"
😯 Say what you really mean then. But that brought me to this...music videos aren't as prevalent as they once were. As a matter of fact MTV and other Viacom networks like BET and VH1 don't even play music videos as much as they once did. So are music artists not spending as much time and money on music videos because of that? I think so, but luckily we have YouTube and streaming services like Apple Music and Tidal that have exclusive videos. Also with a lot of artists trying to own their own things and not rely so much on record labels the budget may not be there to make elaborate music videos.
MTV is attempting to bring the music television back to their name with bringing back TRL, but I don't think it'll ever be like it once was. It use to be a big deal for artist to be in that top spot on TRL or 106 & Park and other music video countdown shows, but now I believe they are more so for themselves and to give their fans a visual of what they imagined when performing the song.
I do appreciate visual albums like Beyoncé's "Lemonade" and Jay-Z following her lead with the "4:44" visuals along with short documentaries on the meanings behind the songs. Even Kendrick Lamar's visuals on the "Damn" album are high quality. These visuals are becoming more cinematic, almost to the point of short films.
I am down for the come back of music videos and hope when MTV does it they do it right. I hope more artists start to do more too. I'll never forget the most memorable videos that were on the countdowns like TLC's "No Scrubs", Usher's "Burn" and Backstreet Boys' "I Want It That Way". I'm ready for those countdown shows to come back on and there to be a mass conversation depicting them and what not but for now I'll stick to streaming them online.