← Ongoing History of New Music
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Hey, it's Alan and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music. Early and ad free on Amazon Music included with Prime. The 80s and 90s were the golden age of the music video. MTV was a powerful musical, cultural and even political force that extended beyond the United States. MuchMusic had the Canadian market all to itself and was minting new domestic stars by the dozen every single year. The same thing with video channels in the uk, France, Germany, Australia and everybody else. If you wanted to be a star, you had to have a video to go with every single you released. And because everyone was making videos, competition for attention was fierce. Budgets got bigger as production values increased with artsy themes, special effects, expensive sets, new video technology and on location shoots, big name directors were brought in. Some video directors were so good that they were able to make the jump to TV and movies. They became stars themselves. David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Mark Romanek. Releases of videos by big stars were cultural events and sometimes talked about more than the song itself. And that's because videos were supposed to say something. A basic performance clip just didn't cut it anymore. Artists looking at their royalty statements got a bit of a shock. After being convinced to make a video for a million dollars, something that happened with even mid level bands, they found that money being clawed back from their earnings. A video was promotion and all promotion was a recoupable expense. But that could be okay. If the video helped the song and the album catch fire. If it resulted in more radio play and more CDs sold, then, well, the cost was worth it. There was some pushback from artists, but they were largely drowned out by the music video making machine. And there was just too much money at stake. The music video had grown up into a global industry and then technology intervened and the whole system seemed destined for extinction. This is part two of the Rise and Fall and Future of the Music video. This is the ongoing history of new music podcast with Alan Cross. There's an example of a band, a song, a director and a music video coming together perfectly on every single level. That's the Beastie Boys and sabotage from their 1994 album Ill Communication. The song itself is brilliant, built around a bass line Adam Yock was messing with in rehearsals, Ad Rock picked up a guitar and Mike D sat down behind the drums and they hashed it all out. The working title was Chris Rock because they had a sound engineer named Chris who thought the song really rocked. After working through several arrangements, the vocals were recorded on handheld mics to bring in more of an authentic rap feel. And then some turntable scratches were added in to finish things off. The video was directed by Spike Jones, a guy who cut his teeth photographing skateboarders. He and the Beastie Boys came up with a concept that parodied 70s crime shows, complete with all the cliches and bad mustaches. The clip itself was shot with a skeleton crew. Everybody fit into one van and they had no permits. But the compact crew allowed them to shoot things quickly on the streets of Los Angeles. And the budget was relatively tiny to the other videos of the era. It was a major hit on all the video channels. It won five trophies at the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards. It also won awards from Billboard and at the Music Video Production Awards. Spike Jonze would graduate to Hollywood level director, starting with being John Malkovich in 1999, which was nominated for three Academy Awards. His films have since won two Oscars, three Golden Globes and two British Film Awards. Some people even credit the Sabotage video as creating the template for movies like Anchorman, projects like Lonely island, and even the entire concept of the Adult Swim cable channel. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross, and this is the second half of a program looking at the rise, fall and future of the music video. The power of the video and the channels that broadcast them were at their peak in the early to mid-90s. By this time, music videos were the number one promotional weapon available to artists and labels of all genres. Videos flowed 24, 7. There was no control by the end user. You had to wait for your favorite video to come up. But as you dutifully watched and waited, you were exposed to so much music that you might not have otherwise seen or heard. And these were not just songs wrapped in short films. They were often events. The music video had matured into a serious art form. What used to be filler and ways for artists to skip live appearances became the be all and end all. When the video for Michael Jackson's Black or White premiered in November 1991, and it was seen simultaneously by 500 million people, thanks to MTV, VH1, BET, and the brand new fourth TV network, Fox. In fact, the video gave FOX its highest ever primetime TV ratings in its young history. Hollywood director John Landis was in charge in an era when most TVs were still in mono. This came with a Dolby Surround mix. And people talked about the clever morphing visual effects for weeks, maybe months. Total cost about $4 million, which is about 9.2 million today. But it was all Worth It Dangerous, the album that featured Black or White, saw sales of 32 million copies. Nine of the 14 songs were released as singles, four of which reached number one, and the subsequent world tour grossed $100 million. The clip for Madonna's Vogue was really a black and white art film. Guns n Roses spent $5 million on Estranged, a nine minute song from the Use youe Illusion 2 album, which helped that record sell around 10 million copies. And then there was Everybody Hurts by R.E.M. directed by Brit Jake Scott. It was filmed around an interchange where Interstate 10 meets Interstate 35 in San Antonio, Texas. It features the band stuck in a traffic jam and the subtitles of thoughts from other people in the same predicament. At the end, everyone vanishes, with Michael Stipe being the last. If you're a student of film, you might have been struck by the similarities to Frederico Fellini's 1963 art film Eight and a Half. Everybody hurts. I'll emphasize this again. By the early 90s, music videos were expected to make a statement, to mean something, to say something. This was, for all intents and purposes, cinema. But then the alt rock revolution hit. These artists were largely disdainful of the whole we must make a video practice and were often openly hostile to the MTV machine. And because alternative, especially grunge, got so big so fast, the entire ethos of music videos shifted. Glamour was out. Unpolished and authentic was in. Fancy sets and costumes were out. Anti fashion took over from fashion. Handheld camera and band performances were in. And while many alt rock bands turned up the sincerity factor to 11, they also turned up the level of irony. This marked a fracture in the music video world. Together with the rise of hip hop, especially gangsta rap, everything was divided into scenes. The monoculture of the music video was dead. Instead of sitting down to watch a flow of videos from all genres, programming on the video channels began to fragment. Video channels were forced to devote special programs to certain genres to to meet that demand. And this is where we began to see shows like 120 Minutes, Headbangers, Ball, Yo, MTV Raps, TRL, the Wedge and Rap City. But not everyone was willing to play this game. Some artists realized that music videos were a big financial drain. They followed the thinking of Led Zeppelin, who never ever made a promo clip. There were tool videos, but none featured the band. The Grateful Dead rarely touched the idea. Kate Bush only made a few. And after obediently making clips for the first four singles from their debut album, Pearl Jam refused to do any more for about six years. This was the third, There would be one more video from Pearl Jam's 10 album. And the song was Oceans, which was a black and white film of the band in Hawaii, but it was only released outside the U.S. pearl Jam wouldn't do another video until do the evolution. In 1998, however, things were different in the hip hop world. If alt rock was about refusing to sell out, hip hop's attitude was all about cashing in. Money, status, luxury and identity were all very important, and video budgets reflected that. MC Hammer, Busta Rhymes and Puff Daddy had no trouble spending a couple of million on videos. Tupac, missy Elliott and Dr. Dre used their videos as branding, not just to sell a single or album. Meanwhile, pop superstars kept spending ever greater amounts, adjusted for inflation. Madonna spent over $32 million on just three videos between 1989 and 2002. Michael Jackson spent $42 million in today's money on four videos between 1987 and 1995. And thanks to the billions generated by the sales of high margin CDs, there was still plenty of Runway left. No one could see an end to things, but the end was coming. The late 90s continued to be a great time for the music. Video Production values soared thanks to new technology like desktop editing, computer graphic images, green screen technology and other tools. Things looked better and cost less. Clips became even more high concept with wild camera moves, lightning fast editing and post production flourishes that would have been impossible just a few years earlier. Digital replaced film and anything analog. A great example is Tonight Tonight from the Smashing Pumpkins Melancholy and the Infinite Sadness album. The premise was an homage to a trip to the Moon, a 1902 silent film by Frenchman Georges Melais. There were elaborate turn of the century costumes, a group of people flying to the moon in a zeppelin, and tons of set design and post production. No one has ever revealed how much that video cost, but it has to be close to $2 million. A significant part of the budget went to those costumes. James Cameron was shooting Titanic at the same time this video was being made, and he just rented just about every old timey costume in Hollywood. So this meant new clothes had to be made for the Smashing Pumpkins from scratch. But again, it was worth it. Not only did the video win a bunch of awards, but it helped Melancholy, a double album, reach number one on many of the charts around the world, including Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand and Sweden. It was top 10 in more than a dozen other countries. Total sales around 10 million copies. So a couple million bucks for a video for one of Five singles from the album Worth It. High concept music videos were everywhere in the mid to late 1990s. Radiohead had a bunch, Bjork was into it, Jamiroquay's Upside down and All Around Virtual Insanity clip. Glamour returned to pop music with expensive videos from Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys and NSync. And hip hop continued to mime themes of money and power and status. A channel like MuchMusic was so powerful and so popular, its Big shiny tunes compilation CDs were amongst the best selling albums of the year in Canada. An addition went 3, 6, 8 times platinum. In 1997, Big Shiny Tunes 2 sold over 1.2 million units in Canada on the strength of the 100% alt rock track listing featuring the Prodigy, Blur, Marilyn Manson, Bush, Collective Soul, the Tea Party, Radiohead, Stone Temple Pilots and more. Much music was doing so well, it spun off much more music, much loud and other channels. But very quietly, something was starting to crack. The generations that grew up in music video since the early 80s were growing up and moving on. MTV was the first to move, realizing that they needed to broaden their programming base. Labels had always chafed to giving the channel videos for free. So that was causing friction. And MTV knew that the monoculture, this all things to all people paradigm that had existed for the last couple of decades was breaking up. Music videos had begun to lose their novelty and fewer and fewer people were excited about them like they were in the old days, which really was just a few years earlier. MTV began moving to reality tv, cartoons and personality based shows. Competitors started to follow. Instead of uninterrupted flows of music videos during primetime, the such programming was moved to off peak hours. The future lay in shows like the Real World and Total Request Live. The status of videos began to decline. They were no longer events or these standalone artsy productions. They morphed back into short term promotional vehicles. There was a feeling that the concept of the music video having been perfected in the 90s, was now exhausted by 2000. People in the recorded music industry were really rethinking the efforts being put into making videos. If mtv, the primary gatekeeper and disseminator and customer of videos, was losing interest in moving on, well, what was the future? But there were still a few more video stars. What Madonna was to music videos in the 80s and 90s, Britney Spears was to the new millennium for better or worse. She was portrayed as the new sex symbol. In 2003, the clip for me against the Music, which also featured Madonna, cost about $3 million to make in today's money toxic in 2004 cost about 1.6 million. Oops. I did it again in 2001.4 million. And Britney sold tens of millions of albums as a result. And the rock world was still in the habit of making videos, especially around 2000 to 2004 during the indie rock revolution and the subsequent resurgence of all things rock. At that time, for example, Queens of the Stone Age was able to claw their way into the sphere of attention with the clip for no one knows in 2002. And it kind of did help that some guy named Dave Grohl was playing drums. It was cool stuff, but there was no avoiding it. The return on investment in music videos was shrinking. And then came the thing that no one saw coming. On February 1, 2004, three tech guys working at PayPal, Chad Hurley, Steve Chan and Jawed Curley sat down to watch the super bowl between the Patriots and the Panthers. The halftime show featured Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake, which was produced by mtv. At the end of the song Rock youk Body, Timberlake reached over and pulled off part of Jackson's costume, revealing her right nipple to the broadcast audience for approximately 4/10 of a second. In America, you can show gun battles and all kinds of violence on primetime tv, but a woman's nipple for less than half a second. The result was a heated controversy called Nipplegate, and everybody was talking about it. But unless you had taped the performance on your VHS machine, there was no way to go back and see what the big deal was. This frustrated our three tech guys. Was there nowhere this could be seen online? Shouldn't there be some kind of site where people could post video to share? All three had plenty of money from eBay's buyout of PayPal, so they could afford to do some coding. Initially, the plan was to create a video dating site where people could upload videos of themselves and and when that didn't work, they pivoted to allowing anyone to upload videos of anything and they called their site YouTube. The first video was uploaded on April 23, 2005. It's a 19 second clip showing founder Jawed Karim in front of some elephants at the San Diego Zoo. Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants. Cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long fronts and that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say. Now YouTube wasn't the first video sharing site. Vimeo was actually first, but never really developed as a standalone platform. YouTube quickly caught on, especially after Saturday Night Live Uploaded the video to the sketch. Lazy Sunday boom. That was the match for people to start uploading all kinds of video. The problem was that people started uploading copyrighted material, including music videos, without permission. And that was a legal nightmare. But that didn't scare Google. On October 6, 2006, Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion in stock. They set about sorting out all the legal and licensing issues and. And within about a year, this is 2007, YouTube was consuming as much bandwidth as the entire Internet had just a few years earlier. This was the end of the music video as we'd known it in the old days. MTV, MuchMusic and the rest of them decided what got shown and when. This was tied into budgets, promotions and relationships with record labels. Basically, if your video didn't get onto one of the music video channels, you did not exist. But with YouTube, well, that was different. Anyone anywhere could upload a video, and anyone anywhere could watch any music video anytime they wanted for free. We no longer had to depend on the whims and timings of some faceless network if we wanted to discover new music or go back and see an old video one more time. The old gatekeepers were gone, made extinct practically overnight. YouTube was right there for the rise of social media. MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. And the thing about social media is the comments and shares. This was addictive and intoxicating, allowing a whole new way of interacting with other people online about anything, including music videos. Music videos became searchable, embeddable, shareable. And this changed the job of music video creators. Videos had to stand on their own without an introduction by a vj. They were now viewed without context and metrics, changed views, replays, votes up, votes down, number of comments, the clip's virality, time spent watching and skips. And different kinds of videos started getting big traction. For example, this showed up in 2006. Take a look Inside Is My In a Box. Artists quickly turned their focus from Feeding MTV and MuchMusic to Feeding YouTube. And few bands got it more right than Weezer. Their 2008 song Pork and Beans incorporated all the biggest Internet memes to that point. The Afro Ninja, Tay, Chocolate, Reyne, Zonday, the Dramatic Hamster, Mentos and Coke, the Leave Britney Alone Kid, the History of Dance Guy and a ton of others. It was brilliant, really. By the time we arrived in the in 2008, the year Spotify went online, the recorded music industry had changed drastically. Music piracy had taken its toll. CD sales had been in free fall for the entire decade, with no signs of slowing. Record Stores were closing, and this streaming thing promised unlimited access to music for free, or something very close to it. The money dried up, and with that, so did big spending on things like marketing and promotion. And that meant budgets for music videos almost disappeared. But all was not lost. The music video was not dead. It just adapted. And that part of the story is next. As the 2000s and 2010s progressed, the music video channels showed fewer and fewer music videos. Reality tv, lifestyle programming, movies and reruns of the Simpsons took over. The future was online, especially after Apple kicked off the smartphone revolution. With the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, YouTube became more important to the labels and artists than the video channels. But then there was also Vevo, a joint venture between the four major record labels at the timeuniversal, Sony, Warner and emi. The concept was a platform that showed nothing but music videos controlled entirely by the major labels. The goal? A place for premium videos, and hopefully a place that would attract high value advertisers. Vivo launched on December 8, 2009. Partnerships were launched with MTV Networks and the company secured a channel on YouTube. Vevo was both a place to go to watch online videos and a supplier of videos to partners. This meant fans could go to YouTube or MTV or any other partner and see a music video branded Vevo. And then in 2013, Vevo TV was launched. This was a 24 hour Internet channel running blocks of music videos and various music specials. It was all a bit confusing, but it worked. Vevo destroyed MySpace Music, which up until 2009 was the most visited music site in the US and both labels and artists loved it. Because of the audience metrics that could be studied, it became a marketing battle to see which artist could have the most views on vevo in a 24 hour period. Meanwhile, the cost of making a music video dropped dramatically thanks to consumer grade gear that was as good as or better than the gear that was once required to make a pro shot video. Here's where the iPhone comes in again. Somewhere around 2008, an app called PSICorder appeared. It could be installed on jailbroken early iPhones and and was useful for shooting video. In 2009, a guy named Steve Ellington shot something he called technologic overkill on an iPhone 3GS. It features a little blue robot lost in a world of, well, technologic overkill. The artist is Zfia Overkill. It's pretty primitive compared to today, but with each passing iPhone release and Android phones, the ability to shoot better video increased. In 2010, a group called Flakjacked used an iPhone4, which could capture video in HD. If you watch the clip, the quality of production is right up there with what took hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions in the 80s and 90s. Today, shooting a video on a smartphone is commonplace. Artists as big as Lady Gaga and Olivia Rodrigo have shot videos this way. Heck, the 2025 movie F1 starring Brad Pitt is loaded with iPhone pro footage. Shot in 4K. This cheap and powerful technology allowed musicians and video artists to run wild. Freed from punishing budgets and empowered by gadgets already in their pockets, these artists created some crazy conceptual stuff for really next to nothing. In fact, concept replaced spectacle. The new tech meant that you didn't need a lot of money and gear to pull off something amazing and wonderful. It didn't have to be as glossy or as slick as videos from the 80s or 90s. It just had to make people go, wow, that's cool. Let me share it. And the best early example is probably the famous treadmill choreography video for OK Go's. Here it goes again, which goes all the way back to 2006. The measurement of success for music videos changed too. How many views, how sticky is a video? That is, how long did viewers stick with a video before skipping or going on to something else? Did viewers click through to other videos by the same artist or did they go elsewhere? Was the video shared? If so, how? Email? Social media, embedded on a website? All this data is extremely valuable. What was learned from this data? You had to hit hard with something in the opening seconds of the video. There was no time for any sort of cinematic buildup. Just get to it. And there had to be more emphasis on some kind of visual hook. We began to see stratification of videos online. Maybe start with a visualizer. Abstract images as the song played. From there, a lyric video might be the next step before we finally get to the official video. That could be original material shot with an iPhone or an Android. Or it could be found video taken from public domain sources. Or it could just be a static image with audio. And then there's the whole fan generated video thing, such as using a song as a soundtrack to a TikTok video. In other words, there's not just one type of music video anymore. We have multiple visual expressions of a song. And everything has to be on YouTube because, well, that's where we've been trained to look for music videos. Now, because YouTube views have been legally monetized and because YouTube is available globally, it flattened everything. Geographic barriers are gone. K Pop can be seen everywhere. Latin music exploded, Afrobeat has gone international and music now exists in a borderless world. For example, it was a big deal when Gangnam Style by Psy became the first video to hit 1 billion views on YouTube on December 21, 2012. Today, a billion views of a video is commonplace. Hundreds of videos have reached that milestone, including this one as I sit here in March of 2026. It has been seen 2.2 billion times on YouTube. Let's look at where we are today. The monoculture. This idea that everyone listening or watching generally the same thing, or at least aware of what everyone else was listening to, is gone. It's been replaced by individual curation of music consumption, pushed forward by algorithm powered discovery. Shared music experiences don't exist like they used to when everyone watched MTV or MuchMusic at the same time. We watch music videos on our own individual schedule. VJs are no longer there as cultural guides. The old macro culture is gone, replaced by micro scenes. And the relationships between artists and fans are more direct. As for creators, budgets are lower, but access to gear is easier and cheaper, allowing for creativity to flourish. YouTube and Vevo democratized access to music videos, destroying the old cultural gatekeepers and their business models. A big Moment came at 6:00am GMT on December 31, 2025, when MTV shut down the last of its global music video only video channels, 44 years and five months since it first signed on on August 1, 1981. And it ended just as it began with the Buggles. And video killed the radio star. And this is what it sounded, Radio star. All that was left was a graphic of the MTV logo with a crawl that read MTV Music is now closed. Music videos continue to thrive not just as entertainment and promotional vehicles, but as global data driven things. More music videos are being produced than ever before. As an art form, it is very much alive. And YouTube is the big winner. According to data released in January 2026, 1/3 of all views on YouTube are music videos. Maybe this is the best way to sum things up. I read this somewhere. Music videos aren't dead, they just escaped television. And it turns out that video did not kill the radio star. People who grew up watching music videos on MTV and MuchMusic often get nostalgic about those old days. Part of that nostalgia is the notion that we all watch these clips together. It was a communal thing. Today though, we live in a Tower of Babel society and we like it. People love their niches. We're individuals, we're unique and we choose our music accordingly. So is the Old school music channel dead? Well, no, just go online and you can find a number of them. But as for TV returning to this format, I can't see it. But it was fun while it lasted, wasn't it? There are hundreds of ongoing history shows available as on demand podcasts. And I did say hundreds of. They're all free and you can download them wherever you get podcasts. And while you're there, grab a few episodes of Crime and mayhem in the music industry. That's my Music meets true crime podcast. Let me know what you think of that. Well, you can connect on most of the social media networks. I'm always updating my website with music news and information, which is@ajournalofmusicalthings.com it comes with a free newsletter and you can always email me about anything. I'm available through AllenAllencross CA and yes, I will personally respond. Technical productions by Rob Johnston. I'm Alan Cross. Firefighters risk their lives every single day. Fridays on global. I'm gonna get you out of here, bud. This is the greatest job in the world. An all new fire country. Firefighter Leo, I need you to make your own risk assessment. We're going in. Deep in the woods behind you, there's a wildfire. We're in the game now, boys. TV's hottest show, be safe keeps getting hotter. Will you help? 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