Planning-MTV (1980's)

MTV is an American network based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981. The original purpose of MTV was to be music television which played music videos 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These videos where put on-air by personalities known as VJs, or video jockeys. The original slogans of the channel were "You'll never look at music the same way again," and "On cable. In stereo."

Although the original MTV channel no longer plays music videos 24/7, several newer channels do so, including MTV Hits and MTV Jam. The first music video shown on MTV was The Buggles, "Video Killed the Radio Star". The second video shown was Pat Benatar's, "You Better Run." Between music videos the screen would go black when an employee at MTV inserted a tape into a VCR to play the next video so there was brief intervals between videos of just a blank screen whereas nowadays you would see commercials between videos.

MTV was the beginning of the modern idea of music videos. Music videos were for the first time available on cable TV for anyone to watch kicking off their popularity. Because of this, artists began to compete with each other for who had the best music video and who can reach the number 1 in the charts of that time.

Stuart Deller