Remember coming home from school to watch your favorite music video countdown show? Whether you were into the teen pop on TRL, the rawness of Rap City, or the cool urban edge of 106 & Park, there was something for all music tastes. You could not catch new videos or see your favorite artists make appearances anywhere else. If you missed it, you knew you would be left out of the conversation the next day at school. The exclusivity these shows offered were priceless. But today we no longer have to wait to watch music videos thanks to the internet, our generation’s new best friend and the music video countdown show’s new worst enemy.

“If I hear a new Jazmine Sullivan song…and I want to see if she has a video on YouTube, I can go there and check it out. Its instant access and this is what this generation is becoming affixed to,” says Martin Berrios, music editor at AllHipHop.com. After holding sales and marketing positions at music companies such as Warner Brothers and Sony BMG for 15 years, he started writing for Allhiphop.com in 2004 as a plan B due to the shrinking music industry. “If you’re going to have to wait two hours for Rap City to come on, it’s just like what’s the point when you have the internet.”

Originally music video shows were the only place one could see videos. “Me being from the Bronx, or living in any borough that wasn’t classified as an upper-middle class borough, we weren’t able to get cable. So all we had was…Video Music Box, which was huge to us because we would…finally see what these artists and tastemakers of life would look like, act like, and talk like,” says Berrios

Video Music Box, created by Ralph McDaniels, has aired for 25 years, and is the longest running TV show centered around Hip Hop. “I think Ralph McDaniels pioneered so much. He would brand each day differently like Old School Wednesdays, Flashback Fridays…and he also had social and political commentary. When the Central Park jogger got raped, God bless her soul, he was definitely advocating for the arrest of the kids who raped her. So I got to give him props for…really laying down the blueprint for every other urban video show to follow,” Berrios said.

But now music video shows are losing their appeal. Recently, BET’s Rap City was canceled and will be ending it’s 19-year run on October 29, 2008. It was one of the only music video shows to cater to the rap fan and is known for the freestyle booth in which rappers showcased their rhyming skills. Big Tigger, former host from 1999-2005 was known for freestyling with artists in the booth. Shortly after his departure, the show was cut from a two hour format to one hour in October 2005 due to a decline in ratings. Rap City’s replacement, The Deal will air this winter.

Similarly, MTV’s TRL was canceled in September 2008 and will aired it’s finale on November 16, 2008. The show was most popular during Carson Daly’s reign as host from 1998-2003. According to Nielsen Media Research TRL’s ratings peaked at 757,000 in 1999. TRL is the catalyst that boosted the popularity of teen stars such as N’Sync, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera.

But now that music video shows are losing popularity, artists must now find other ways to promote their music videos and create buzz. “They’re going to have to catch up with this whole viral online thing. These music video shows are going the way of the dinosaur,” says Berrios. He also mentioned 50 Cent as an artist leading in online marketing and promotion. “He had some vision because he was the first major artist around to have his own social networking site, THISIS50.com…So now you have a hub where anybody that’s a fan of 50 Cent…will know that if a freestyle dropped 10 minutes ago, it will be up there.”

Jahi Whitehead, senior Audio Production major, and Programming Director at WHBC feels similarly. “Artists are creating their own blogsites and are doing their own reality shows whether online or on TV and putting their music videos on before or after their shows. They will also utilize YouTube for promotion like Soulja Boy.”

Artists, like Soulja Boy Tell’em, who was unknown only two years ago, exploded onto the music scene using online social networking sites like MySpace and YouTube. “The internet definitely lowers the cost of production. Before you had to have a huge crew and set, now all you need is a green screen and a good graphic artist. And you don’t need CDs when you can just upload it to Imeem or iTunes. Nowadays people can have studio quality work with a really small budget,” Whitehead says.

The music video show’s relevance may also be declining because enough attention is not given to the actual music video. Cris Thorne, a junior, Film major says, “The emphasis is more on the person now than their music, and they don’t play the whole video.” To him the VJs are no longer interesting. “The people who used to do it were more involved in the music industry like Fab 5 from Yo! MTV Raps and Carson Daly on TRL. The people today don’t really have personality.”

To Thorne, artists simply are not being creative enough. “There’s a lot of stories people tell through music, but you’re not seeing the actual visual adaptation through the music videos…You want to appeal to the 5 senses and put a different twist on it, instead of the normal themes like women, money, cars, etc.”

Because of the lack of interest, the future of music video shows may seem dim. “I think we have to break out of the normal format. Let’s think of something new. Let’s do something fresh. We can listen to radio and guess who will be one, two, three, four and five on the countdown. I don’t care who you have hosting it. If you have 50 Cent hosting it day in and day out for a year that’s going to become tiresome too,” Martin Berrios says.

As MTV, BET, and VH1, all originally music television channels, eliminate music video shows from their lineup and increase their number of reality television shows, prepare for the music video show extinction. Now that television, once thought to be giant of all media, has been taken over by a new king, the internet, the music industry must now bow down and adapt to the new rules of the internet age.

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