The unsinkable Bob Lefsetz basically sums up what I felt about MTV’s Video Music Awards in a long rant against the irrelevant, patheticness of the whole VMA awards show. Sure, tt’s hard to find commentary from the last few years of VMA’s that doesn’t include “debacle” in the headline. It’s long but worth the full read, but these excerpts hit home especially strong:
In an era where the niche is king, where the mainstream is shrinking, MTV tried to be all things to all people. Like a cheerleader being nice to the nerds for a few hours. But didn’t MTV get the memo, THE NERDS RULE!
MTV established a monoculture. There was no longer an underground, there was no FM to compete with AM, it was what MTV played and everything else, winners and losers. And to think it was about music is to believe visual stimulation holds no weight, that seeing Britney Spears shake her hips titillates you not a whit. MTV was the paragon, driving hell-bent into the distance, defining youth culture, for those truly young and those who desired to be young. But, MTV never saw the cliff ahead, never saw the nascent Internet, a village off to the side. Hell, the whole entertainment industry didn’t see the Internet and still doesn’t.
Suddenly, we’re back in the sixties. You’re either with us or against us. Either you’re wired or your irrelevant. Either you can tweet, update your social networking site and text all at the same time, or you’re hopelessly out of date.
Facebook and Twitter are tools. Frameworks wherein individuals place their content, not for everyone, but for their accumulated mass, which could be two or three or a few thousand, but which is rarely millions. If Whitney Houston can be all over mainstream media and only sell three hundred thousand albums in a country of three hundred million, do you really think the mainstream counts? The mainstream has become a sideshow!
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MTV is about fame. For a while there, the two merged, music and fame were interwoven. But then fame came to rule. Look good, be a pawn in our game and we’ll hook you up with songwriters and stylists, we’ll create a product that will make you famous! But is that really why anybody picks up an instrument? For fame? Is there no reward in music?
Today, when the fame game pays fewer dividends than ever before, we’ve got whores who are trying to hold on to the little that’s left of the old paradigm, and newbies who’ve chucked it all, who are trying to make it on what comes out of the amplifiers, not what you see on the screen. The only people who have not caught on are those in the mainstream media, flogging each other’s products like they truly matter. But if NBC is putting Jay Leno on in prime time, and can make money and will be satisfied with a 1.5 rating, which is fewer than 2 million households, does it really make sense to overpay to produce this tripe that so few are truly interested in, that generates less revenue than ever before?
It’s about music. It’s about generating an audience the old-fashioned way, through hard work and what comes out of the speakers. Getting lucky on TV doesn’t work, because no one’s paying attention, the active audience is in front of the computer screen, or focusing on their phone as opposed to passively sitting in front of the box.
That’s the revolution the oldster media just doesn’t get. The days of passivity are done. We’ve got an active audience. Which is engaged by truth. All we saw last night was phoniness, an irrelevant train-wreck with the nutritional value of Froot Loops. You didn’t miss a thing.
via Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » The VMAs.
It’s almost as if MTV still hasn’t figure out if they’re in on the joke, or now just the joke. It’s almost like every year there’s a new low, as if to speed the mainstream media implosion… yet with money and sponsors and enough half-drunk, half-dressed, half-wit celebs behaving badly, MTV can continue to shine it’s chrome bumpers and hope nobody notices that the wheels have simply come off altogether. The old guard, the programmers, the MTV paid Twitter hype-men, the ad sellers, and the majors can’t afford for it to die, but they can’t fill the ever-widening relevancy gap that the internet and connected social media has opened up in front of them. The VMA’s have become spectacle for the sake of the chatter that arises from it. Full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing?
Why this matters: We are living in the attention economy. The value a piece of media provides, no matter how expensive or polished, still has to stand on it’s own merits, not be force fed, devoid of any intrinsic value just based on the channel it’s broadcast from. As an experience planner, my team strives to design media experiences for emergent, connected and social behavior. As mainstream TVs fall off their stands and break into a thousand tiny pieces, each piece can become more valuable, more urgent, more earnestly personal. Every niche ignored by the mainstream has the potential to be deeper, more connected, more mobile, more contextually relevant. A single old-wave monolithic paradigm tastemaker just can’t hold anymore, and creating a spectacle that just gets worse and worse every year. This isn’t the way to carve out a future for the music industry in general, much less music VIDEOS in particular. No, you won’t fool the children of the revolution.
Update: Lefsetz elaborates further. Money quote: “Gossip must be the underbelly, not the primary. We seem to carom from one celebrity event to another, from Michael Jackson’s death to Kanye, and since the news media sees itself as stars, they throw logs on the fire.”
