Several record companies hated the very idea of MTV. Across 11 videos, the gruff-voiced rocker made 16 appearances in the space of 24 hours. But the day pretty much belonged to Rod Stewart. But what about the launch date’s other milestones? Well, Pat Benatar’s “You Better Run” was the first female-fronted promo to air REO Speedwagon’s “Take It on the Run” was the first bit of concert footage screened, while their track “Keep On Loving You” was the first U.S. So everyone knows that The Buggles were the first act to be played on MTV. Rod Stewart was the most-played artist during the early days of MTV. It actually took several years before the rest of the country could experience the joys of watching everything from Cliff Richard to Iron Maiden in the same programming block. That's because the moment that The Buggles’s “Video Killed the Radio Star” helped to kickstart the music video revolution could only be seen by New Jersey residents who subscribed to a particular cable operator. Most of America couldn’t watch MTV when it initially launched.Īlthough the birth of MTV is widely regarded as one of the most important pop-culture developments of the 1980s, the majority of Americans didn’t even have the ability to witness it. It’s symbolic.”) and the rest is pop culture history. Thankfully, Casey used his persuasive powers (“Nobody’s going to be watching. And some MTV producers believed that they needed to launch with a bona fide hit. Although it reached number one in the band’s UK homeland, the track only peaked at No. But program director Steve Casey claimed that he faced pushback from other creatives about the network’s first-ever promo. The Buggles’s “Video Killed the Radio Star” seems like a no-brainer to kick off a station playing nonstop music videos. And it only cost the station a measly $1000! 5. Its large block letter ‘M’ spray-painted with the smaller letters ‘TV’ became one of the decade’s defining pop culture symbols. It was only when Manhattan Design, a hip New York graphic design collective, came on board that the station started to develop a style in keeping with its youthful spirit. Alongside the attempt to brand the station the rather dull-sounding TV-1, producers were also thinking of adopting a run-of-the-mill logo akin to the likes of NBC and ABC. The creative juices didn’t appear to be flowing in the run-up to MTV’s launch. Even then, they still took a while to get it right, as Pittman explained in the Los Angeles Times in 1991, “The best we could get was TV-M … and TV-M it was, until our head of music programming said, ‘Don’t you think MTV sounds a little better than TV-M?’” 4. In what proved to be a blessing in disguise, his legal team discovered that another unimaginative business had already got there first. Pittman had wanted to christen the exciting rock and roll revolution as the very unexciting TV-1. MTV could have avoided all the jokes about music television with no music if the network had been able to stick to its original name. The MTV Moon Man attends the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards at the Prudential Center on Augin Newark, New Jersey. In Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum’s exhaustive oral history book, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, head honcho Bob Pittman revealed, “We sent a letter to his lawyer: ‘If we don’t hear back from you, we’re going to run this.’” Unfortunately, just days before the station’s launch, they did hear back from Armstrong and in the form of a lawsuit threat, too. MTV had planned to accompany its stock footage of the famous Apollo 11 moon landing with Neil Armstrong’s iconic quote, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” And they were banking on the astronaut being too apathetic to deny them permission. Neil Armstrong wasn’t on board with being quoted in MTV’s promotional materials. Lack was also the man who announced to the world at the 1979 Billboard Video Music Conference that “ video radio” was about to change the game, 2. Chief operating officer John Lack, who’d previously overseen the similarly pioneering show PopClips, had been pivotal in making the idea of 24/7 music videos a reality. And they were delivered against a backdrop of another major launch-the Columbia Space Shuttle from earlier in the year-by one of the network’s key players. “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.” These were the simple but effective first words ever uttered on MTV.
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