MTV Channels to close

The fact it's Paramount doesn't fill me with confidence tbh. They could well be flogging a dead horse at this point.

I seem to recall something about a live show in Hamburg in the late 90s that went disastrously wrong?

He's on RadioEins in Berlin these days…

https://www.radioeins.de/team/a_z/ray-cokes.html

I've often heard about the "Hamburg incident" that ended Ray's career, but I never knew what actually happened.

Digital Spy to the rescue. Sounds like MTV treated him pretty badly:

Super Channel was very much of those early days of pan-European television that never quite lasted beyond the start of satellite TV - as soon as the vast amount of digital channel space arrived in the late 90s they split everything up - always felt that was the end of MTV as we knew it - MTV Europe had a very particular vibe that MTV UK/Ireland never quite had and then it all went down hill into reality tv mode, just as music was sliding over to streaming online.

I’d say the challenge to launching a music channel back then was probably acquiring rights to broadcast music videos, of which there weren’t all that many made until the industry actually scaled up - MTV would end up being the vehicle for that as artists actually produced video with a view to being on MTV. Prior to that music videos were a bit of a rarity and bands tended to appear live or lip syncing - Top of The Pops being the prime example of that in this part of the world.

ABBA aren't notably early in doing it. They were really, really prolific and still really popular though so you'll definitely see lots of their videos.

There's what we'd consider as recognisable music videos back to the mid 60s, but they're very rare until the 70s. Generally done to send a performance to be aired on a TV show the other side of the Atlantic - because there weren't really many other outlets. ABBAs videos would have been for the same purpose.

The Troggs - Wild Thing - 1966 for instance.

Also videos cut from footage from the movies featuring the artists that did movies - Elvis and the Beatles being really obvious examples but you also had people like Cliff Richard - which were used for the same purpose; and as filler in cinemas or to promote the movie.

Videos being made for basically every single is early 80s to mid 00s; and probably hasn't recovered to that era even with Youtube etc now - a big thing being that there isn't really a concept of a single anymore. Lyric videos are often the only thing done for secondary tracks these days; and maybe one or two real videos an album.

To answer my own question, MTV 90s will be changing to MTV XMAS as usual next week (for the final time.)