If Video Killed the Radio Star Than What Killed the Video Star?

Not so much who killed the Video Star but who or what killed music on television. Music and television seemed to go hand in hand in the 80's and early 90's but towards the end of the 90's into the 2000's music and TV seemed to be polar opposites and this time opposites did not attract. Growing up in the music video era, MTV used to be the hot spot to hear some good and new music, now MTV is the perfect place to watch people embarrassing themselves on ridiculous dating shows. I'm not quite sure what Dating Mothers has to do with Music but maybe MTV (Music Television) knows something that I don't. The question is what happened to music and television? No longer do people even associate MTV with music, and even when we thought VH1 was going to hold its ground and continue playing music they went into the celebrity reality business. For me I feel there are two things that led to the destruction of music and TV.

The first thing that led to the downfall of music and TV appears to me to be the diversity of music at this point in time. I don't think that ever in the history of music has there been such a large diversity. From Pop, to Rock, to Emo, to Rap, to Metal, to the Singer Songwriters and beyond leads me to believe that this is one important factor to the death of this once thriving business. Of course music has always been diverse but never to this point, even in times of heavy music diversity one genre always seemed to take the cake as the most popular especially during the 80's and earlier 90's. As of now with the immense diversity of genres the allocation of fans seems to be rather equal. Along with the diversity the discontent between genres seems to be rather heightened, those who listen to metal usually hate emo, those who listen to rock seem to hate rap, those who listen to nearly anything besides pop usually hate pop. With all this hate and diversity television just cannot win when playing music. If MTV were to play every genre then people would just flip in and out every few minutes if they stuck to just a certain genre they are losing a huge base of viewers. Regardless of what they do it is very difficult for them to come out victorious. The 80's was dominated by rock and hair bands, the early 90's was dominated by grunge. Rap was obviously around during this time but didn't quite break out the way it did in the later 90's. These non diverse times led to the perfect break out for both VH1 and MTV.

The second thing leading to the death I believe is the Internet. The power of the Internet was unleashed in the later 90's, no longer was music difficult to attain, with just an Internet connection music was just a click away. I don't honestly feel that the videos really drew people to watch MTV it was more or less the music. Of course the videos are nice to watch but it is the music that counts and why watch the TV waiting for a song you want to hear when you can just download it in a few seconds. If you want to make the argument that people do indeed want to watch the videos they are easier to attain than the music itself. Launch.com made an incredibly large database of music videos and once again why would one want to wait for a video they want to see when they can just hop on the internet and see what they want when they want. I once would badmouth MTV for no longer playing music but who can blame them. We are at a point in time where music and TV just don't go together. The Internet juxtaposed to TV for music is just a much more efficient option, and along with the Internet at this particular time in music history, the diversity of genres also leads to nothing but pain for TV and music.