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The Music Dies as MTV Hands Out Pink Slips

Once upon a time MTV was the newest,  hottest thing to reach cable television.  I remember during its early years when critics predicted it wouldn’t last and that viewers would get tired of watching music videos.    Well,  they were right.  Sort of.

The initial model for MTV as it turns out was a good one.   Record companies, back when there was still a music business, provided gratis promotional videos for MTV to air in rotation on its channel.     MTV used video jocks, different than record jocks, to talk their stuff and engage the audience between videos.   There were comments, interviews, more promotionals, and sometimes some funny situations.  It happens when your video jocks are stoned or at least seem like they are.

The videos themselves were thematic and for the time anything for puerile and boring to sensual and cutting edge.   It was a great time to be in the music video business, and more than one director made the crossover to feature films.

then themusic business fell on hard times. Not much sense in making a plethora of music videos for CD’s no one would pay for anyway.   So MTV shifted formats, utilizing reality themese and other situationals to keep running.   We soon had young person’s soap operas, covering all the issues that seem so pressing at youth anf all off the priority list over time.   So whether it was the aging of the audience or just general malaise, ratings have declined.

Now MTV is laying off 75 mid-level executives.   The company blames the recession.   That means 75 more people in the entertainment and media business will be unemployed and looking for work, calling their friends to see what it is out there.  They will encounter a tight market for sure, where more companies  even in the loosey goosey entertainment world are conducting background checks as part of their pre-employment screening process.   With a shortage of jobs and in a lousy economy, employers can afford to be picky.

It will be interesting to see if MTV reconstitutes itself.   As with General Motors and a fair portion of other American industrial icons, it may pose as leaner and meaner.   It may offer the same and accept the decline in viewership as a matter of attrition.   But with 75 more mid-level executives out of work, MTV will have to think of something.

By Gordon Basichis

Gordon Basichis is the Co-Founder of Corra Group, specializing in pre-employment background checks and corporate research. He has been a marketing and media executive and has worked in the entertainment industry, the financial, health care and technology sectors. He is the author of the best selling Beautiful Bad Girl, The Vicki Morgan Story, a non-fiction novel that helped define exotic sexuality in the late twentieth century. He is the author of the Constant Travellers and has recently completed a new book, The Guys Who Spied for China, dealing with Chinese Espionage in the United States. He has been a journalist for several newspapers and is a screenwriter and producer.

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