📺 MTV: How Video Killed the Radio Star | 23

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I mean, I'm not aging us here because I think it's the case for most of our audience, Jack.

But when we were in high school, smartphones didn't exist.

No, they did not.

It was a big deal if someone had a razor or a sidekick and you could pretty much only play snake on one of those things.

Yeah, I had a flip phone that I only got freshman year of college.

Cultural memes spread differently when you don't have the internet in your pocket.

Well, that's because it spread through word of mouth, so it has a little more staying power.

And as a result, when something spread, it took over the entire semester.

Even the movies had a different impact.

Like Meme Girls, everyone was showing up wearing pink for the next three months.

It's almost hard to imagine one viral moment capturing our entire generation for such a long stretch of time today.

That's exactly it, Jack.

Like the media environment today, it is so fragmented.

Everyone's newsfeeds are personalized.

It is hard to envision, say, one platform or one TV channel with the power to define culture.

But for anyone born before Y2K, this place did exist once, and it was known by three initials, MTV.

I want my MTV!

I want my MTV.

I want my MTV!

Home of hair metal and headbangers, parachute pants and baby tees, and rappers spitting rhymes into a camera that for some reason were always at ankle height.

Yeah, hip-hop stars in the 90s had to have really strong calves and hamstrings.

MTV delivered the biggest names in music right to our living rooms from Madonna to Bjork to Beyonce, Biggie and Tupac, Briot Girls and Spice Girls, Prince and the King of Pop.

And if cultivating the music video industry wasn't enough, MTV also hits us with a brand new category of television, reality TV, an industry that is now worth almost $2 billion in the US alone.

There's no real housewives today without yesterday's real-world Rogue Rules challenge.

And MTV was also the creative force behind Beavis and Butthead and movies like Napoleon Dynamite.

Oh, and Jack, the Video Music Awards, the VMAs, the award show that launched a thousand memes.

Add it all up, and there's a fair argument to make that no single TV channel changed culture as much as MTV.

But when MTV launched in 1981, its success was as uncertain as a victim on Ashton Kutcher's punked.

So besties, today we're going to hear how MTV honed in on a lucrative but totally untapped demographic.

Teens to not just reflect culture, but to define a generation.

And along the way, we'll visit MTV Spring Break, we'll visit Total Request Live, and we'll probably end up landing on the Jersey Shore.

Plus, we'll tell you what MTV's entire business model has to do with penguins in Antarctica.

So hit the dance floor before the beat drops and frost those tips.

Here's why MTV is the best idea yet.

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You smell that?

That's a mix of English leather, aquavelva, and old spice.

The raining aftershaves of the late 1970s, the sprawling conference space of Los Angeles's Sheraton Universal Hotel.

And it's filled with executives slathered in all that stuff as they mill around in wide lapel jackets talking about the future of the music business.

It's November 1979 and Billboard Magazine has its eye on the future.

They're hosting the first ever video music conference and a 35-year-old cable executive named John Lack is getting ready for his big moment.

Now, in 1979, a video music conference sounds a little bit like a Mars tourism seminar.

Because at this moment, music videos are barely even a thing and they are definitely not on TV.

You can find music on TV from time to time on shows like American Bandstand and Soul Train, but music videos as we know them exist in only a tiny niche space.

Record labels create them as short promotional films like movie trailers but for an upcoming song or album.

A great example of this?

Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody.

Galileo!

Galileo!

But there's no good platform for music videos yet.

Now, our guy John, he wants to change that.

And that's why he's here at the Los Angeles Sheraton Hotel surrounded by all that aftershave smell.

He's preparing his mental note cards for a panel called Video Music.

Tomorrow is here today.

We'll come back to this event in a second.

But first, some context on who this guy is and why he's so excited about this concept.

John Wack grew up in New York City, a rock and roll fan and a little bit of a rebel.

He'd obsess over artists like Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker, Buddy Holly and Richie Vallins.

He would even sneak out of prep school just to see one of these rock concerts.

Picture young John rocking a leather jacket, running a comb through his greased pack hair.

Oh, and then Jack, didn't he like get kicked out of school when he was younger too?

For doing something pretty legendary.

Actually,

he got caught drinking out of his state wrestling championship trophy.

Well, John has straightened up since then, but he's still a big personality with the confidence of a new car salesman.

He got his start at wcbs radio in new york before moving to warner communications to help grow a new thing at the time called cable tv and john had just recently overseen the nationwide launch of an early cable channel that's just for kids it's called nickelodeon kids it's up to you watch nickelodeon every day or else

give them the yammy just give them the emmy jack

now obviously kids programming existed long before nickelodeon like sesame street and mr Rogers.

But Nickelodeon is nothing but kids' shows.

13 straight hours every single day.

And it's available only to cable subscribers.

It's bringing rugrats and green slime to the masses, becoming a major new business driver for its parent company.

So when Nickelodeon debuts nationally in April 1979, its audience is around 500,000 households.

But immediately, Warner projects that number to triple.

Those are huge growth numbers.

Now, John, he may be an adult, but he's actually learning from Nickelodeon.

He sees how targeting a specific age can drive audience growth.

It's actually counterintuitive, but going niche can actually mean going big.

And so he sees an opportunity here.

What age group doesn't have a show for them yet on this new cable TV jack?

Teams, the hard-to-get youth vote that anchors the most coveted demographic in advertising, ages 12 to 34.

Get them on your side and your business is hold free.

So So John turns his attention to this demographic that like kids before Nickelodeon seems totally untapped.

And as John is pondering this, Mike Nesmith, the guitarist from the Monkeys, he's pitching John on a little pilot that he's been working on.

It's called Pop Clips, a 30-minute show that plays different video music clips on TV.

Mike's been shopping this pilot to every TV network he can get a meeting with, but no bites yet until he shows it to John Lack.

He thinks pop clips is a great idea.

He starts developing this musical pilot to air on Nickelodeon.

But that's only the beginning.

John thinks that the music video format could actually be way, way bigger than just one show on a kid's channel.

John has this gut feeling that music videos could sustain an entire cable network, micro-targeted to teens just like Nickelodeon targets kids under 10.

Which is why John is getting ready to take the stage at this Aqua Velvea-scented music video conference.

His panel on video music is about to begin.

And on this panel, John preaches.

Preach, John.

And he shares this vision for an all-music video channel.

A channel that he'd have killed to watch back when he was a rebellious teen, airing 24 hours a day, seven days a week, just music videos.

John is hopeful.

The crowd isn't just full of network suits.

There are music suits here too.

Maybe they'll understand how big this idea could be for them.

As if to prove that point, someone in the audience stands up.

It's Sidney Scheinberg, president of MCA Records.

They rep Belton John, Neil Diamond, Leonard Skynyrd.

So John holds his breath, expecting Sid to start a slow clap.

But instead, Sid says,

We ain't giving you our fingers music.

Okay, that

feels like it's going to be a problem, Jack.

So, the thing about record labels is they do not like giving out their core product for free.

Cock off, Napster.

We just saw this play out recently when Universal Music Group pulled its entire music catalog off TikTok because they wanted more revenue per play.

Beyonce ain't UNICEF.

She's not giving out this stuff for free, man.

And in late 1979, before the streaming era, record labels are at the height of their powers.

So, yeah, it is John Lack's idea of playing music videos 24-7 royalty-free, That is, without paying the labels for their content, to record executives like Sid, that sounds like a lot of money left on the table.

Why would they agree to that?

No free music from the record labels means no green light from Warner, who are the ones who actually fund the project.

Actually, Jack, we should point out a funny little business wrinkle here because it's not just Warner's board who has to say yes to this music channel idea.

It's also American Express.

Right.

As As John is sweating it out at this conference, Warner Cable is in the midst of a merger with the credit card giant.

Let's just call them Warner Amex for now.

But Jack, let's go back to our guy, John.

He actually needs 25 million bucks in order to get music television channel off the ground.

And he's got to get half of that from Amex and half of it from Warner, which means John has to convince two multinational corporations even before he gets to the record company Comundra.

So he's going to need help getting everyone on board.

Someone smart with charisma who knows the music landscape inside and out.

So John brings in a new hive, one that will end up being the key to everything.

The Mississippi hippie.

Sounds like a WWE wrestler.

It does, but his actual real name is Robert Pittman, aka Bob.

He's 26 and flies airplanes in his spare time.

He sports long hair and he's also got a glass eye.

Bob was born in Jackson, Mississippi.

Hence the nickname.

At the age of six, he actually lost his eyeball in a horseback riding accident.

So as a teenager, he finds his first calling in the audio industry.

And he actually becomes an on-air DJ at the young age of 15.

Bob's been working at NBC Radio until John recruits him to Warner Amex to help him build this new cable TV channel.

He's John Lack's secret weapon to building MTV.

Because remember.

To get music television going, John has to win over two opposing parties, the Warner Amex board, the ones with the money and the green light power, and the record labels, the ones with all the music.

Making headway with either side, though, takes months.

By now, we're well into 1980.

Okay, so Jack, how is he approaching the board?

He focuses his pitch on the thing he knows they care about, demographics.

Fact, teens are an untapped market.

Fact, teens drive culture.

And fact, culture drives spending.

With Nickelodeon, John's already proved that micro-targeting one one age group works.

But the spending power of the under 12 set, it is nothing compared to teenagers.

Not only will teens drive cable subscriptions, teens will drive ad revenue.

Finally, after what feels like a zillion pitch meetings, John finds himself, Bob Pittman, and a handful of other Warner execs in the room where it happens.

A meeting with the CEO of American Express.

Remember, John needs $25 million and half comes from Amex.

So there's a lot riding on this conversation.

This Amex CEO, by his own admission, he doesn't really get the whole music on TV thing.

So he keeps asking like, where do you get your raw material?

What does it cost to shoot a video?

Who is Bon Jovi?

Forget about whether these record companies will license their songs for free.

What's the cost of producing the actual goods?

Fair questions, but that's when Bob, the radio expert, hits Amex with a fun fact.

Zero.

As in, making music videos will cost the network nothing.

Remember what we learned about music videos earlier?

They started as promotional material, as in content that record companies are already giving away for free.

After all, what is a music video, but a really fun commercial for the band and for the label?

Both are trying to sell albums.

Well, once the finance guys at Amex understand that they won't have to pay for licensing or the video shoots, they're in.

And Warner, they quickly follow.

Boom, Jack, MTV just got Greenlit.

The money's in the bank, but now they need one more thing.

They need some music.

So John Lack and Bob Pittman's corporate funding is secured, but it's also contingent on somehow convincing stubborn record moguls to continue footing the bill for new music videos and then sharing those videos with MTV for free.

What was that quote from the the record guy, Sid Scheinberg?

We ain't giving you our fing music.

This is gonna be a tough sell.

So, Bob, the ex-radio guy, he calls in every favor that he has in the record industry.

He hits the road, trying to bring record companies on board with MTV.

His strategy?

Focus on what the record labels need.

Bob tells them, cable is growing.

Teens are watching.

And every video you make is like a national ad campaign micro-targeted at your core audience.

Only here, you don't have to pay for the airtime.

Instead of paying CBS to promote your album in a 30-second TV commercial, we'll promote your album to a more targeted audience for free with an entire three or four minute music video.

And unlike on radio, every time a video gets played, MTV will display captions naming the song title, the artist, and the record label.

Well, Jack, when you frame it that way, music television starts to make a lot more sense to the music executives.

And by the end of of this whirlwind pitch tour, Bob has cleared out 250 music videos to use on MTV.

Not a massive number, but like that's a pretty good start considering where we began.

Just one wrinkle.

30 of those videos are from one single artist.

Oh, and who is that?

Randomly?

Rod Stewart.

Yeah, Rod Stewart was like one out of every eight songs on MTV.

If my mom knew that, she would have been watching a whole lot of MTV.

In the end, MTV just rolls with it.

Get ready though, because MTV's launch day is just around the corner.

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It's midnight on August 1st, 1981, and you're a 16-year-old kid in the Cleveland suburbs.

You spent all yesterday at the skate park and you've been slamming Mountain Dew since 7 a.m.

So what's an insomniac teen to do when they're up this lake?

Turn on the TV and channel surf.

With the remote in your hand, you're trying to find something on that isn't an infomercial.

And suddenly, you see something

different.

Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.

Well, grab another Mountain Dew Jack, because after that message, you are about to witness the first music video ever to air on MTV, and you're into it.

And based on the choice for that first music video, the message is not subtle.

Oh, the business undertones, Jack.

This is Shakespearean.

Yeah, this song by the Buggles pretty much sums up MTV's mission statement.

MTV spends a lot of this first broadcast onboarding their audience, basically saying, here's what we are.

Here's why we're different.

It actually doesn't sound that much different than an infomercial.

But don't worry, Cleveland teens, you won't be stuck in infomercial land forever.

Because next up, meet the Vijays.

Well, all right, I'm JJ Jackson.

I'll be sitting in with the latest video music performances the way they were meant to be.

On MTV Music Television, you'll never look at music the same way again.

That's short for Video Jockeys, the TV equivalent of Disc Jockeys.

The VJs are foundational to MTV's early appeal.

They are the faces of the brand.

Here's how Bob Pittman puts it.

Nobody falls in love with the jukebox.

You have to have a bond with a human being.

So the VJs don't just play the next song.

They also share music news about things like Madonna's upcoming tour, Van Halen's new album art, and behind-the-scenes tidbits about the videos that you're watching.

Viewers connect with these liaisons.

And when it comes to choosing the VJs, John Lack is not afraid to typecast.

He's like, let's get one girl next door and let's get one boy next door and let's have a couple of hotties thrown in there.

These are all the cool looking young people you take fashion advice from.

In fact, Mark Goodman, he's so cool, he's actually sitting on top of the desk with his legs crossed.

Take that, society!

Mark is the one to guide us through these first critical hours of MTV.

We hear bands like The Who, The Pretenders, Pat Benatar.

You can definitely feel something in the air tonight.

Now, does the audio drop sometimes?

Yes.

Do the camera cues get sloppy?

Also, yes.

But even the flubs, they feel scrappy and scrappy is authentic.

And everyone watching MTV's midnight debut is stepping into an elevator on the ground floor of something huge.

And that elevator, it is only going up, baby.

Just five months after launching, Fortune magazine declares MTV the product of the year.

At the time of the launch, MTV is available to less than 3 million cable subscribers.

But within two years, viewership shoots to 13 million.

Okay, that is quintupling its subscriber numbers.

and it becomes the highest rated cable channel ever at the time.

Just one year in, the network makes more in ad revenue than any other cable channel.

By 1984, MTV is in the black.

Basically, John's bet was right.

Young people are craving this content and MTV isn't just showcasing youth culture.

They're actively defining it by curating new artists for young people all across America.

This isn't just a channel, MTV, it is a platform.

What Instagram is today for influencers, MTV was becoming for musical artists.

But as Spider-Man's Uncle Ben tells him, with great power comes great responsibility.

And in this sense, MTV is about to really drop the ball.

It occurred to me, having watched MTV over the last few months, that it's a solid enterprise and it's got a lot going for it.

That is the iconic David Bowie.

And he's sitting across from VJ Mark Goodman for for an interview segment on MTV News.

It's meant to promote Bowie's latest hit single, Let's Dance.

Bowie wears a brown tweed suit jacket and a tie and still manages to look like the coolest man you've ever seen.

It is 1983 and MTV has come a long way from the channel that was 12% Rod Stewart.

They're not just showing videos these days, they're interviewing the stars themselves.

But even as Bowie praises the network, our video jockey Mark seems a little bit nervous because he knows there's a butt in Bowie's question.

Narrow casting?

Yeah, that's a marketing term that generally is harmless, but in this context, it is coded language that both Bowie and the audience can see straight through.

For all the ways MTV is ahead ahead of its time, they're behind in one big one.

They have actively avoided showcasing black talent.

And it's not like black artists aren't available at that time.

Have you heard of Michael Jackson?

By 1983, it is hard to find someone who hasn't heard of Michael.

He's been a star since his days in the Jackson 5 back when he was just a tween.

In 1983, he just invented the moonwalk.

Michael's single, Billie Jean, it climbs to number one and it stays there for seven straight weeks.

His record label, epic.

It asks MTV to air Michael's elaborate, exciting, and expensive new video for the song.

But the exacts over at MTV, they look at it and they say

no.

Even though the whole country wants to listen to Michael Jackson's music and see him moonwalking, something they probably only heard rumors of at this point, MTV says no to Michael Jackson.

They say that Billie Gene is RB, not rock and roll.

Ah, they're narrow casting.

Now, Bob Pittman, our hippie from Mississippi, defends this approach in an interview, claiming that specialization is what makes cable work.

It's true that specialization was key to the MTV pitch as a way for the network to target one slice of the demographic.

But MTV's reluctance to put Billie Gene in their rotation exposes an ugly fact.

When network execs say, we cater to teens, the teens they are talking about are white teens.

Epic Records smells what's happening here and they decide to fight back.

Epic is owned at the time by Columbia Records, a division of CBS, and CBS represents a lot of artists beyond Michael, the Moonwalker Jackson.

So Columbia goes big here.

They tell MTV that if they don't air Billie Gene, they are going to pull all of their musicians' videos from the entire network.

We're talking Journey, Pink Floyd, and a whole bunch of major hitmakers beloved by MTV's non-R ⁇ B teen audience.

Wink wink.

So no Michael, no dark side of the moon.

MTV's response to this musical showdown?

They cave.

They finally air Billie Jean.

And the result?

No shocker.

It's a sensation.

Well, this opens up the floodgates because Michael's presence on the MTV Airways opens the door for other black artists on the channel too.

Prince, Whitney Houston, Salt and Peppa, Run DMC, Michael's little sister Janet.

and later, MC Hammer, Public Enemy, Mary J.

Blige, Boys to Men.

Literally, thousands of talented black artists get their first drops on MTV thanks to this MJ drama.

This Billie Gene breakthrough also paves the way for Michael's own magnum opus, the 14-minute monster movie and dance video all-in-one.

Thriller

MTV premieres the thriller video on December 2nd, 1983.

Oh, and they don't just play it, they play it.

As in, they air this one music video three to five times a day.

Not only that, but the VJs start announcing to the audience the next time they're going to play Thriller again.

That single song becomes a non-stop part of MTV's 24-7 content rotation.

Oh, and on the business side, there's a huge ROI on that single music video.

Get this, on the days they air Thriller on MTV, their audience ratings go up 10x.

Now it'll take MTV another five years before they create yo MTV raps, an hour totally dedicated to hip-hop.

But when they do, it opens the door to a more diverse, less sanitized kind of music.

And of course, MTV's viewers end up loving it.

Suburbs in the mid-90s, they fill up with blonde kids rapping along to Snoop and Dre on the school bus home from lacrosse practice.

They're sipping on Capri Sun and listening to gin and juice.

And just think, MTV almost missed out on all of that.

MTV was supposed to be defining culture, not retreating from it.

This is a good reminder that when you lose track of your first principles, you lose track of opportunity.

Speaking of first principles, Jack, and defining culture, I think it is time for us to shift to a way less serious, more lowbrow chapter in MTV's journey.

I think I know where you're going.

Let's grab the SPF and catch some waves.

Is it the middle of March yet?

All right, Jack, let's trade that Capri Sun for a Corona because it's springtime in Daytona Beach, Florida, 1986.

VJ Alan Hunter, he stands on a windy stretch of sand, microphone in hand, and this Alabama native is doing what he does best, talking to strangers in bikinis.

Students from all over the country scrimp and save.

They practice their belly flops.

They tighten their buns.

They work out a little bit.

They drive for days on end just to spend a couple of days here in Daytona Beach.

Alan himself is not in a bikini.

He's wearing a sweatshirt.

It's chillier than you might think on this Florida beach in March.

Well, this windswept interview is actually the tamest that MTV's Spring Break is ever going to get.

For a whole week, Alan is playing a southern boy David Addenborough capturing spring breakers in their natural environment.

He interviews Hawaiian tropic models, chants with frat boys, and when the cameras are shut off at night, yeah, he explores the clubs and the party scene.

MTV Spring Break is a copper tone-scented experiment that'll become an annual ritual for the network.

The most profitable form of entertainment in the last half century.

MTV has already proven itself the king of the youth market.

It's in over 28 million homes at this point.

And just a year prior, it was acquired by Viacom in a massive deal worth about $700 million.

Not bad for a channel that was launched for $25 million and a handful of Rod Stewart singles.

Now, at this point, John Lack, he actually left MTV.

He's gone on to invest in a video vending machine startup, which sounds awesome.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work out.

Don't worry too much for John.

He goes on to co-found ESPM2 later.

But for Bob Pittman and the other MTV executives, they are ready to push some boundaries.

So they start wondering, how could they make MTV immersive?

That's when they come up with a plan for spring break as an IRL experience.

A no-rules live event that every college, high school, and from personal experience, middle school kid badly wants to be a part of.

In between sunburned shoulders and barefoot interviews, there's some actual music too.

They host live pool deck concerts featuring acts from Radiohead to the Beastie Boys.

Listen, everybody, listen one and all.

We die today, Tona, and we have a new

one week spring break.

It ain't funny.

Said two days passed and I'm running out of money.

If MTV 1.0 brought youth culture to your living room, MTV 2.0 is designed to draw youths out of the living room and onto the beach.

MTV is strategically expanding the brand from a visual experience to a physical experience.

But besties, hold on to your tankinis because this spring break formula is not without its problems.

As VJ Alan Hunter himself points out, the environment is less than ideal for his female colleagues.

He'll later note to GQ that Martha Quinn didn't want to be jumping into a pool in her bikini around a whole bunch of drunk frat boys.

Fair point.

Plus, MTV's presence at Daytona Beach has side effects for the town.

In 1989, just three years into the spring break experiment, this kind of chill resort town is now swamped by 400,000 incoming partygoers, and it leads to tragedy.

Eight different people fall off of balconies that year, one of them fatally.

Well, after that, MTV, they start rotating in new locations like Panama City Beach and Cancun, Mexico.

It's as if with spring break, we are watching MTV MTV go through a type of business puberty.

MTV is awkwardly figuring things out as it grows, just like its viewers are in real life.

Turns out, MTV's key learning from spring break isn't about high-cut swimsuits or wet t-shirt contests.

It's about creating live experiences that strengthen their relationship to their audience.

And that insight is what leads to MTV's cornerstone show.

of the millennium.

The one that will define its daily programming, not just its seasonal spring break programming.

How do do they take what works on a hot Florida beach two weeks of the year and scale it to a show that can be produced all year long?

How are they going to pull it off, Jack?

Well, for the next six years, Carson Daly will reign supreme as the host of a new daily interview/slash request show, Total Request Live.

Hi, hey, it's Carson Daly here.

I'm coming up next, it's TRL.

Top 10 voice requested videos.

Mark Wahlberg will be here.

It's coming up next on MTV, TRL.

TRL debuts in 1998 at the MTV studio in Times Square.

And there, Carson will interview the Hannes Musical Axe in front of a live studio audience, taking their lessons from MTV Spring Break.

Side note, on any given day, Christina Aguilero or Britney Spears were number one, and Baxter Boys and Insync were number two.

Britney didn't have off days though.

The interactive nature of this show jumps up several notches for anything MTV has done before.

Viewers at home can actually call in and vote for their favorite music video to be number one that day.

Meanwhile, Jack, in Times Square, fans who can't be in the studio are screaming from street level for their favorite artists.

TRL is a direct reflection of what MTV has learned from their spring break era.

The fans want in.

They want to see themselves in the programming.

In fact, maybe the music isn't even the most important part of the product.

What if the real intrigue for young viewers is just watching other young people like themselves?

This realization will lead MTV to their boldest pivot yet, which we'll pivot to in a moment.

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Blobby lava lamps.

A massive fish tank.

A pool table with a giant red bow like it's Christmas morning.

It's February 1992 and 20 year old Eric Nys has just walked through the door of a huge apartment in New York City.

The loft, it's big enough for eight people.

But right now, Eric is all alone.

This is the true story.

True story.

Seven strangers

picked to live in a loft and have their lives taped to find out what happens.

What?

When people stop being polite.

Could you get the phone?

And start getting real.

The real world.

Nick, this is the most efficient intro ever.

Tells you everything you need to know about it.

When you think reality TV now, you might picture Kardashians or a real housewife throwing a goblet of wine in someone's sister's face.

But back then, MTV's the real world is closer to actual reality.

And the cast members, ages 19 to 26, they do get real about religion, race, abortion, illness, sexuality, every issue that is on the minds of MTV's teen audience.

The show is actually the response to a directive from MTV's top brass who said, create a new teenage soap opera.

Complete with hookups and breakups and late night visits between housemates.

And yeah, they'll even put cameras in the bedrooms that that capture the action from above the sheets.

Oh yeah, MTV, they make sure to catch the spicy moments.

Because at this point in the early 90s, music on television is no longer revolutionary.

MTV's sibling channel, VH1, it is doing the exact same thing as MTV.

And MTV, they've gone from bratty newcomer to a cable institution.

In a way, Jack, MTV is kind of a victim of its own success.

Becoming the top-watched cable channel inevitably would lead to new competition.

The network is searching for the next content frontier.

So teen soap opera it is.

Except producing soap operas is expensive.

You know what's not expensive?

Producing a reality show.

Even one that requires you to rent a 6,500 square foot loft in New York Soho.

Get this.

A single episode of The Real World costs just over $100,000 to make.

That's about one-tenth the price tag of a typical scripted TV show in that era.

No scripts, so you don't pay writers.

No big actors, so no big paychecks.

The fixed costs of a reality show are much leaner than scripted TV.

And that's why the execs are all in.

Reality TV is another financial trick shot, another huge chunk of the day with programming on MTV that's next to free.

On the other hand, Jack, ESPN, they have to pay the NFL billions of dollars to broadcast their football games.

But MTV pays a handful of 19 to 26-year-olds just $2,600 a piece for the entire season of Real World.

Plus room and board and alcohol.

Now, like almost every new step that MTV takes, this format, it is a risk, but it is a calculated risk and it pays off big.

When the show airs in 1992, The Real World triples MTV's primetime audience.

Not quite thriller numbers, but still pretty great.

Plus, it generates a ton of press, putting MTV right back in the cultural zeitgeist.

And amazingly, the show show keeps making news after season one, like in season three's San Francisco season.

One of the cast members, Pedro Zamora, is a gay man living with AIDS, and he actually talks about his diagnosis with a freedom not really seen anywhere else on TV.

For a lot of viewers, Pedro is the first openly gay man they've ever seen.

Forget about the first gay man with HIV.

And at a time when people wrongly think that you can get AIDS just by hugging or touching an infected person, Pedro is right there, living his life in a tight shared space with seven other people.

It's a groundbreaking moment of cultural leadership for the network.

Now, of course, not all of the stuff in this season is culturally important.

Like there is plenty of infighting and there is a good dollop or two of jealousy.

Remember Puck?

Yeah, he would stick his bare fingers in the house's peanut butter.

Okay, that's the kind of thing that gets you kicked out.

But still, the way the real world handles real issues makes it resonate.

And if you've ever shaken your fist at the sky and cursed MTV for getting you hooked on reality TV, well, you're in good company.

Because the first people to get addicted are the MTV execs themselves.

And they're going to go all in on this highly profitable new frontier known as reality TV.

Jack, we do have some bad news for our listeners.

But before we share that with them, There are so many MTV innovations that we haven't even discussed yet.

Like the animation showcase Liquid Television, which gave us Beavis and Butthead and Aeon Flux.

And it inspired later work like King of the Hill and Office Space.

And if exhibit didn't show up to pimp your Prius, why did you even bother to drive to school?

MTV has done a lot.

But by the early 2000s, they have slipped a few spots in the cultural rankings.

Reality shows, they just start choking up MTV's entire daily schedule.

First, we got Road Rules, then Jackass, Cribs, Punked, Laguna Beach, 16 Impregnant, My Super Suite 16.

Even TRL is considered too music-focused for MTV, and it peters out in 2008.

The sea change really comes to a head with the Jersey Shore.

And while the show scores some great ratings, great pregames, and hard launches the GTL Sunday, Jim Tan Laundry, it's a lifestyle.

The Jersey Shore effectively marks the end of the letter M in MTV.

As of October of last year, MTV was the 46th most popular channel on TV in the U.S., with just 147,000 people watching during prime time.

Poor one out for Poly D.

But hey, while viewership may be down, MTV's cultural impact, it remains with us to this day.

Before MTV, music videos were just like commercials given out free by the labels, like the prize at the bottom of a cereal box.

But MTV provided record labels with the correct incentives to invest in music videos.

And now, music videos are on every device you own.

You could argue, and we will, that the three biggest moments for the music industry in the last century were streaming, the iPod, and MTV.

So Nick, now that we've heard the story of MTV, what's your takeaway?

My takeaway is that MTV solved the penguin problem.

The penguin problem is when one bird won't jump into the water until another bird jumps in.

You see this with penguins in real life, but it's a problem we see in the tech industry or other industries where there's a platform product.

In order to launch MTV, John Lack needed to convince Warner and Amex to green light it, and he needed record labels to offer their content for free.

But neither would commit without the other committing.

Nobody wanted to jump in first.

Now, John Lack cleverly solved this penguin problem by telling Warner Amex the content would be free, even though he hadn't gotten the labels on board yet.

He He got one side to commit in order to get the other side to commit.

Some call it manifesting, others call it the power of positive thinking.

He didn't lie to the network.

We wouldn't advise that.

But he convinced the network that the record labels would agree.

And guess what?

They did.

So MTV solved the penguin problem.

Yes, they did.

But Jack, what about you?

What's your takeaway?

For me, it's look for the missing user.

Sometimes the best customer is the one who's missing.

It sounds counterintuitive, but that's what led to MTV's success because no one was serving the teen audience yet on cable TV.

John Lack realized this, so he helped build an entire network around the user who was missing.

All right, Jack, another example of a missing user today, Tech Curious Senior Citizens.

Sure, there's a dating app for seniors, but every technology category should have a company targeting older people, like Cash App for seniors.

We think, Yeti is that the tech industry would do well to create products targeting older people.

Now time for the best facts, yet our favorite tidbits and factoids we just couldn't fit into the story, but we also couldn't leave you without.

Jack, take it away.

Did you know that Adam Sandler got his start on MTV?

Not SNL, MTV.

It was a comedy game show called Remote Control.

Remote Control, it actually also featured another future SNL cast member, Colin Quinn.

Here's another one.

MTV's reality show, 16 and Pregnant, actually had a real-world impact.

The show was credited with reducing teen birth rates by almost 6%.

And last but not least, the very first words spoken on MTV, remember we played them earlier?

Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.

Well, that voice belonged to none other than John Lack himself, the guy who got kicked out of high school for drinking out of a wrestling trophy.

And that's why MTV is the best idea yet.

Coming up on the next episode of The Best Idea Yet, we love the fishes because they're so delicious.

It's the untold origin story of goldfish crackers.

The best idea yet is a production of Wondering, hosted by me, Nick Martel, and me, Jack Kravici-Kramer.

And hey, if you have a product you're obsessed with, but you wish you knew the backstory, drop us a comment.

We'll look into it for you.

Oh, and don't forget to rate and review the podcast.

Five stars, that helps grow the show.

Our senior producers are Matt Beagle and Chris Gautier.

Peter Arcuni is our additional senior producer.

Our senior managing producer is Nick Ryan, and Taylor Sniffin is our managing producer.

Our associate producer and researcher is H.

Conley.

This episode was written by Marina Templesman and Katie Clark Gray, and it was produced by Katie Clark Gray.

We use many sources in our research, including I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Rob Tannenbaum and Craig Marks.

And MTV Wiz Jumps from Hyperactive to Interactive by Katherine Harris for the LA Times.

Sound design and mixing by Kelly Kromerick.

Fact-checking by Erica Janick.

Music supervision by Scott Velazquez and Jolena Garcia for Freeson Sync.

Our theme song is Got That Feeling Again by Blackalak.

Executive producers for Nick and Jack Studios are me, Nick Martell, and me, Jack Ravici-Kramer.

Executive producers for Wondery are Dave Easton, Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Aaron O'Flaherty, and Marshall Louie.

Follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to every episode of The Best Idea Yet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com/slash survey.

How hard is it to kill a planet?

Maybe all it takes is a little drilling, some mining, and a whole lot of carbon pumped into the atmosphere.

When you see what's left, it starts to look like a crime scene.

Are we really safe?

Is our water safe?

You destroyed our town.

And crimes like that, they don't just happen.

We call things accidents.

There is no accident.

This was 100%

preventable.

They're the result of choices by people.

Ruthless oil tycoons, corrupt politicians, even organized crime.

These are the stories we need to be telling about our changing planet.

Stories of scams, murders, and cover-ups that are about us and the things we're doing to to either protect the Earth or destroy it.

Follow Lawless Planet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad-free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.