June 20, 2024 – MTV

Happy throwback Thursday! Today we’re featuring 1981, the year MTV was officially launched! It was the first 24-hour cable network that was completely dedicated to the broadcast of music videos. However, they were a little ahead of their time, because the music video medium was still in its infancy. So when the channel first started, they only had around 250 videos in their library. They went through nearly half of that on the first day!

On Saturday August 1, 1981, at 12:01 am Eastern, MTV was launched with the words “Ladies and gentleman, rock and roll”, spoken by one of the channel’s founders. It was played over footage of the first Space Shuttle launch countdown of Columbia (which happened earlier in 1981) and the launch of Apollo 11. The first music video on MTV was “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles. The channel was originally only available to homes in New Jersey.

Eventually, the record industry realized MTV’s value as a promotional tool, and they started investing in making creative, cutting-edge music videos. MTV was instrumental in promoting the careers of artists like Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, and Duran Duran, whose videos were all in heavy rotation.

However, from 1995 to 2000, MTV started playing fewer music videos in favor of adult animation, like Beevis and Butt-Head and Daria, as well as original reality programming like The Real World, which debuted in 1992. It became the longest-running program in MTV history and is credited as launching the reality TV genre that we know today.

As of November 2023, MTV is available to around 67 million households. That’s down from it’s peak in 2011 of 99 million households.

Learn more here.

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