New New Media

New New Media is especially interesting to me. “YouTube Retrieves MTV” was, of course, the section that grabbed my attention the most. Music videos on MTV, most recently, have been a controversial issue. MTV launched on August 1, 1981 with the words, “ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,” and played over footage of the first space shuttle launch countdown. The first music video shown, as mentioned in the book, was “Video Killed the Radio Star,” by the Buggles and the second video was Pat Benetar’s “You Better Run.” The original purpose of MTV was to play music video 24 hours, 7 days a week hosted by VJ’s. Although MTV doesn’t play music videos 24 hours a day anymore, there are several spinoff’s and recently new shows. MTV Hits was launched that does play music videos all day everyday and MTV also plays music videos for a few hours in the morning. The controversy of why MTV stopped playing music videos is simple. Although I cringe when I get this question, I try to explain it as simply as possible. When MTV plays music videos, our target audience (12-34) does NOT watch them….our ratings plummet and then layoffs start to happen. SO, it is in our best interest and the interest of our target audience to stop playing them. Now, music videos are making a comeback and MTV is starting to play them again. Reality shows, like 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom, and Jersey Shore are what our target audience is watching these days.
Although, I can say that if I want to find a music video fast and easy I also go to youtube. MTV.com is a bit slower to add the newest music videos on their site. It was also an interesting to read about YouTube’s competition with iTunes. iTunes can tend to get very expensive whereas YouTube is free. Recently, I read somewhere that You Tube compromises about 20% of all http traffic and nearly 10% of all traffic. The social networking aspect of YouTube is what I related to as well. Posting videos and clips of the most recent “YouTube Sensations,” is a norm for me on my Facebook page.