Amanda Ann Klein - Millennials Killed the Video Star

This books title, Millennials Killed the Video Star:MTVs Transition to Reality Programming, is a play on two significant moments in the cultural representation of American youth, albeit from two different moments in time. One alludes to the first music video to air on MTV on August 21, 1981, the Buggles Video Killed the Radio Star. The song was most likely selected as the inaugural video for the channel due less to its popularity and more to its timely lyrics, which are ambivalent about advances in technology and culture. The chorus includes the refrain Video killed the radio star / Video killed the radio star / In my mind and in my car / We cant rewind weve gone too far. These lyrics imply that contemporary technology is committing violence against the technology of the past. But whether these developments are positive or negative, it doesnt really matter: we cant rewind, weve gone too far. Over the course of the video, the girl literally and symbolically turns away from her radio and toward her television, which is playing MTVs videos. Video Killed the Radio Star proved prescient; by 1983, just two years after the launch of the worlds first twenty-four-hour video-music channel, music videos, rather than radio programming, became the standard way for record companies to promote artists and their new singles (Ed Levine 1983).

The Buggles Video Killed the Radio Star was the first music video to air when MTV launched on August 21, 1981.

Video might have killed the radio star in 1981, but between 1995 and 2000, the number of music videos airing on MTV dropped by 36 percent. By the early 2000s, it was difficult to locate any music videos on the cable channel (Hay 2001). So who killed the video star? This question leads me to the second important cultural moment referenced in this books title: Millennials, their presumed consumer tastes, and their (assumed) economic power.

These narrativesof the ratings-starved MTV and the industry-destroying Millennialsconverge in the late 1990s, when the channels target audience of Gen Xers slowly aged out of the way, allowing Millennials to become MTVs youth audience du jour. In the late 1990s, MTVs overall ratings were also dropping. This was precipitated by a number of cultural, economic, and industrial factors, including a loss of interest in the faddishness of music videos and the escalating costs of producing music videos. MTV knew it needed to change the content it produced for this new youth audience, the Millennials, and so the channel invested in extensive audience research to figure out what this demographic might desire. A key finding was that Millennials wanted to be a part of the media they consumed. As Jonathon I. Oake writes, Thus, the deviance of Xer subcultural subjectivity lies in its perverse privileging of watching over doing. While baby boomers are mythologized as those who made history, Xer identity is presided over by the trope of the slacker: the indolent, apathetic, couch-dwelling TV addict (2004, 8687). In contrast to the stereotypes of passivity, voyeurism, and cynicism that were ascribed to Generation X, Millennials were imagined as being quite the opposite; they were described as earnest and engaged, with a belief that their actions and words matter and make a difference (Arango 2009). Popular culture represented Millennials as active makers who exude optimism about the possibilities generated by the rise and prevalence of information and communication technologies (ICTs). In response to these findings, MTV created a live countdown show hosted by Carson Daly,