Paramount Erases Archives of MTV Website, Wipes Music, Culture History After 30 Plus Years

[CashmereThoughts]

I hope I'm not overstating it, but I'm not sure if young people today really understand just how big MTV used to be.

If MTV played your video, you had a career.
If they didn't, nobody probably even heard of you.

I probably watched MTV with a decent level of regularity until TRL got popular. I just didn't have the time to watch, nor did I care about VJs like Carson Daly.

It's wild that Viacom would erase that content.

They can’t comprehend impact in a pre internet dominated world.

 

[NoMoreWhiteWoman2020]

Who in the hell was sitting around saying “I really need to get to MTV.com to look up something from 1993”

You could literally say that about anything from the past that can be studied. Those interviews with artists, their perspective on what was happening during that time is unique because it gave the news perspective from a non-older person. Someone might want to examine if this media outlet boosted voting amongst the youth; one could also study the impact it had on fashion.

And these are just off the top of the head. It has historical significance.

 

[HipHopStan]

Some of you don't remember how big MTV was at one point. They were having up and coming Presidential candidates like Bill Clinton on their platform at one point and young people were asking him everything from the Anita Hill/ Clarence Thomas situation to what kind of underwear he was wearing. ()







How the mighty have fallen.

 

[Absolut]

Who in the hell was sitting around saying “I really need to get to MTV.com to look up something from 1993”

No one. Not a clue why this is a story

 

[Rell84shots]

The last time I was on their site was more than a decade ago, when I was watching those extra clips of Three Six Mafia's reality show.

 

[Jimmy from Linkedin]

Many young artists in the Eastern Bloc were hoping that once the government's restrictions on culture were removed, there would be an explosion of new cultural forms, but in many cases they discovered that under the new neoliberal conditions, the market could be more totalitarian in its grip on culture than any state. Many of the brutalist buildings which had expressed utopian social ideals were demolished or simply abandoned or left to deteriorate because their new owners were unwilling or incapable of funding their maintenance...leading people to feel nostalgic for a future that never arrived.”

 

[ORDER_66]

I told artificial intelligence that they could have uploaded a that shyt to a dedicated cloud server...
Someone in the corporate office was being petty asf

 

[concise]

I told artificial intelligence that they could have uploaded a that shyt to a dedicated cloud server...
Someone in the corporate office was being petty asf

Who is going to maintain that cloud server? How much are they willing to pay?

 

[Vandelay]

This is why I download a lot of shyt.

 

[Phantum]

Destroying information will never sit well with me. Seems shortsighted.

 

[Diunx]

Thank god for pirates

 

[Dont@Me]

Im somewhat neutral on this issue. Made my peace with it once YouTube said they would delete old videos, that's when I realized that this constant holding data for years and years isn't sustainable.

Doesn't make sense to expect companies to spend the money hosting all this data that people only use every now and then on nostalgia trips. And I know damn well some of the people complaining are visiting those sites with ad blockers on anyway.

Theres valid concerns on both sides but we live in a capitalist society so cant expect companies not to look out for their bottom line. If you care about it, you gotta save it. They don't care about the complaints

Wait until Spotify goes away and we don't have access to all of our music and playlists

No one wants to talk about that though

 

[DaHNIC82]

Some of yall are really either playing dumb or try to dismiss this as some CAC shyt dont see the big picture. This is BAD and this is how history gets rewritten

 

[Taadow]

This sucks...in theory.

...but in practice, I have a grip of VHS tapes with The Grind, Singled Out, Say What?, The 9/9/99 VMAs, and I have the entire series of Daria on DVD.

I am perhaps now a Media Mogul of some kind if I can flip this right (I probably can't).

 

[At30wecashout]

Some of yall are really either playing dumb or try to dismiss this as some CAC shyt dont see the big picture. This is BAD and this is how history gets rewritten

This is not on the same plane of importance, but I can think of a few games from the early 90s and 2ks that have zero disks for sale, no distribution online, and functionally only now exists in my memory. Data is a huge part of how the economy works now so archival for archivals sake may go away in favor of what makes money. Imagine major events taking place, not big enough to be world news but big enough to shape your life, but you have no way of proving it due to there being A: no more print articles (we already walking down that road now) B: No physical media backups C: No streaming presence due to copyright or lack of interest.

Real talk, if not for the occasional old show or maybe a chance encounter with a museum exhibit, kids wouldn't even know corded phones were a thing. Thats a veritable blip on "list of important things to know" but it shows how quickly we can lose out on recent decades of info simply because its not profitable to keep it on record. This is where the world has come to.