The story went from a Monkey to a Mogul to the birth of a new Music Medium. Welcome to MTV.

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Dave Young:
Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast. Dave Young here, Stephen Semple alongside. You told me just 10 seconds ago we’re going to be talking about MTV, and that’s the first thing that popped into my head. I’m not bad at that, am I?

Stephen Semple:
No, that’s not bad at all. It’s amazing how MTV has changed, but, anybody from our generation, that’s MTV.

Dave Young:
We remember when they played music.

Stephen Semple:
We remember when they played music.

Dave Young:
They gave awards for music and music videos.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. They’ve really changed, but we’re going to go back to the fun early days when they were actually a music channel. That campaign was amazing. We’re going to pause for a minute and we’re going to slot in a whole pile of those I Want My MTV ads at a certain point here because the list of musicians that they had do that is just incredible, just incredible.

Dave Young:
You may not have as deep awareness of this as I do. Do you know the very first song that they played when they launched MTV?

Stephen Semple:
I do, and you can share it right now.

Dave Young:
Well, because I was in the radio business, right? The first song was The Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star.

Stephen Semple:
Killed the Radio Star, yeah, exactly, which was so funny.

Dave Young:
Everybody in the radio business is like, “I like MTV, but this is ominous.”

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, you got to really have a sense of humor to do that.

Dave Young:
We’re in trouble now.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Exactly.

Dave Young:
Then they quit playing music and radio was fine.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah. Exactly. Radio outlasted MTV in the end. MTV was launched on August 1st, 1981, and it’s the flagship property of MTV Entertainment, which is now part of Paramount. Yeah, it’s not in the music world really today, but, when it launched, it changed the music world, and that’s what we’re going to really talk about is the change that happened. The idea, I don’t know that you’re aware of this, Dave, but the idea for MTV was created by Michael Nesmith, who people from our generation would know as one of the monkeys, so one of the monkeys created the idea for MTV, which I thought was really, really incredible.

Dave Young:
Really, and he was such a creative, even a filmmaker, right? He did music videos before MTV. He did films.

Stephen Semple:
He did. Yes, he did. He was a real pioneer in music videos. He wrote this solo tune in 1977 called Rio, and he was asked to create a clip for it. What everyone was expecting was the standard clip that was done at the time, which was a guy standing in front of a microphone singing the song, right? Instead, what he did is he created this clip where there were shots from locations and all these other things that didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the song, and this is considered the world’s first music video, because this is not what people were expecting. They were expecting this shot of him singing in front of a mic, and they got all this other stuff instead. What ended up happening was this ran, this got aired in Australia, the video, and Rio went number one in Australia with the airing of this.

Now, it wasn’t called a music video at the time. It was called a video record is what they first called it. This got Nesmith thinking, and he ended up approaching John Lack, who at the time was at Warner Cable TV. John Lack is a pioneer in his own right especially in cable television. He developed The Movie Channel. He developed Nickelodeon, ESPN, too, a bunch of stuff, so this guy was an absolute innovator on his own right.

Dave Young:
Just out of my own personal curiosity, can we go back to that clip? Was it Lucy and Ramona and Sunset Sam? That was from the Rio album. Yeah. It was the music video or video song that was with this musclebound guy and these two girls on roller skates and really a fun watch. I know that was from the Rio project. That’s probably the one.

Stephen Semple:
That is the one. That is the one. I didn’t know the people, but that is the one. Yep.

Dave Young:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that song’s going to be buzzing through my head the rest of the day. I watched that thing so many times. I had it on VHS before. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
That was the very, very first one.

Dave Young:
Okay, so he contacts…

Stephen Semple:
He reaches out to John Lack and he says, “This is a really neat idea. We should look at how this is done. We should do something like this,” and Lack likes the idea and he decides to run a test pilot on Nickelodeon called Pop Clips. Nesmith, for a bunch of reasons, can’t get involved in the project. Lack ends up buying Nesmith out. Lack buys Nesmith out and creates this idea of Pop Clips that he runs on Nickelodeon and, every time it ran, the phones rang off the hook. This gave Lack the idea, “Maybe what we should do is create an all-music channel from the success of these clips on Nickelodeon, and here’s how I managed to sell this idea to the board.” He goes to the board and he says, “Hey, guys, we have no programs for kids ages 12 to 34. We have this hole in our programming and we could use this to drive the market. Here’s also the other plus.” He’s talking to the cable world. He said, “You know what? This’ll probably also drive cable subscriptions and secondary connections because parents don’t want to listen to their kids’ music.”

Dave Young:
Right, so let’s run the cable down to the rec room.

Stephen Semple:
Correct, or into the bedroom or-

Dave Young:
Put another TV down there. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:
Exactly, so this could deliver audience, sign up new cable subscriptions and sell secondary connections into the bedrooms. Also, his pitch to the board was, “Advertisers would like this because this is a great audience for them. Advertisers like that demographic. They really, really do, but here’s the only challenge. There’s no content.”

Dave Young:
Right. Right, but I think I know where you’re going here because the perfect storm of technology was just coming ashore. I think that particular video was produced on film, but video was coming of age.

Stephen Semple:
It was.

Dave Young:
It was to the point where video recording technology actually met or exceeded the available television resolution. You could actually produce something on video that looked okay on TV. That happened in the early ’80s, and then it became ubiquitous by ’83, ’84. We all had VHS players and we were recording our own stuff, and that even let you record your own music video.

Stephen Semple:
Certainly, that is part of the story, but here’s the challenge that Lack faced is he said, “Okay, we’ve got no content. We need music videos, and we don’t have money. We need to get the record companies to give us this for free.” He approached record labels and got turned down because, at the time, the music industry was in the slump and they wanted to get paid for the content. What he did is he managed to convince a few bands to pressure their label to give them the content. He got enough to get launched, so, on August 1st, 1981, MTV launches with VJs rather than DJs, and the first was Mark Goodman and, of course, as we talked about earlier, the first video shown was Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles, which was a bit tongue in cheek. This is important. A lot of the stuff that they launched with at the time that they launched MTV was not a hit because the stuff that they managed to get from the music industry was not the hits.

Dave Young:
Yeah. I mean, nobody knew who The Buggles were.

Stephen Semple:
Right, and also no one knew who The Tubes were. Let’s keep that in mind. To keep the record labels onside, they had to show that this helped sell records. They went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, because this was a strong cable market, and they wanted to see if there was an effect, because Tulsa had at the time the largest concentration of cable users, and here’s what they discovered. Record stores were selling out of Buggles albums and Tubes albums, the only place in the world where that was happening. Everywhere else, The Buggles was not a hit.

Dave Young:
Really the only place in the world that you could watch or listen to The Buggles.

Stephen Semple:
Right. Right.

Dave Young:
Right, because the radio stations weren’t playing it.

Stephen Semple:
Right, and The Tubes were not getting played anywhere other than MTV and local Tulsa radio.

Dave Young:
There you go.

Stephen Semple:
They went to the radio stations, and here’s what they found. Radio stations were playing The Tubes because it was being requested, and when was it being requested? After playing on MTV. Exposure to MTV led to radio requests and airtime which led to record sales.

Dave Young:
Yeah, so record companies were idiots, a deep history of record companies being idiots.

Stephen Semple:
Here’s the important thing. They now had the proof that it would drive record sales which helped them with the record companies because they’re now able to go back to the record companies and go, “Look, you run this on MTV. It ends up being requested on radio and it runs on radio.” Tick box number one, we now have content, but still no advertisers and there’s no revenue and they’re burning through cash, so he hires George Lois who created a campaign to get them on the map.

Here’s the next thing they figured they needed to get the advertisers is they needed to get more subscribers and, the secondary thing, to just basically show kids were listening to it, so George created the campaign, I Want My MTV, because he wanted to get kids to demand MTV from their parents, “I want my MTV.” He wanted to get big rock stars for the launch to say, “I want my MTV,” so George approaches Les Garland, who’s the program director, to negotiate with Mick Jagger. That’s the first person they want. They want Mick going, “I want my MTV.” Dave, you’d like Les Garland. Les goes to Jagger to approach him to do this, and Mick Jagger says to Les, “We don’t advertise. The Stones don’t advertise.”

Les calls Mick out on his shit, pointing out that The Stones did advertising for Jovan Fragrance, and Jagger responded, well, they did that because the fragrance company sponsored a tour and gave us lots of money…

Dave Young:
There you go.

Stephen Semple:
… to which Les said to Jagger, “So you do commercials for money,” and he said to Jagger, “Here’s a dollar.”

Dave Young:
There’s your money.

Stephen Semple:
Jagger laughs and said, “I like you. I like you, Les. I’ll do it.” Jagger agrees to do the I Want My MTV, and once they got Jagger, they got Billy Idol, they got Pete Townsend, they got Bowie, they got Pat Benatar, they got The Police. I remember those ads, and it felt like every rockstar in the planet was saying, “I want my MTV.” It was just like constant, “I want my MTV,” and it was like everyone was. When you were talking about the record industry being idiots, this actually pulled the record industry out of a slump. Record sales. Following the launch of MTV, record sales started to increase. It really proved its importance to the record industry with Thriller.

Dave Young:
Absolutely.

Stephen Semple:
I don’t know if a lot of people realized it, but when Thriller was released, so the album Thriller was released on November 30th, 1982, and the first three hit singles had videos, Billie Jean, Girl is Mine, Beat It. Almost a year after the release of the album, the video for Thriller was released. Thriller was nowhere on the charts, so think about it. This song had been out in the world for a year and had gone nowhere, and what Michael Jackson did changed the music industry forever. He shot a 15-minute mini-movie on Thriller. The budget was $500,000. It was the largest music video budget at the time, because most were like 50 grand. A big budget was 50 grand. He was like, “No. We’re dropping a half a million bucks on this,” and it was the most successful video in MTV history.

After the album being around for a year and Thriller being nowhere, it suddenly exploded, and that album became the best-selling album of all time driven by this 15-minute music video that was done on MTV because, at that point, between The Tube, what happened, Tubes, Buggles, radio sales increasing, and then, what happened with Thriller, done, the industry changed forever, forever, forever, forever. I believe MTV would still be a force today if it wasn’t for the fact that where people go today to watch the music videos is YouTube.

Dave Young:
Yeah. Well, and then, what, ’83, that album won, what, nine, 10 Grammys, something like that.

Stephen Semple:
Oh, it was unbelievable, yeah, unbelievable.

Dave Young:
I’ll send people down a little weird rabbit hole…

Stephen Semple:
Sure.

Dave Young:
… if you’ll allow. Roy Williams, along with Michael Drew, wrote a book, and Roy did this presentation for at least a decade. Roy Williams is one of our founding partners with The Wizard of Ads in our consulting group, but there’s a book called The Pendulum, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller plays actually a big part in it because 1983 was this tipping point in the pendulum cycle of societal change. There’s an 80-year cycle that we live in. This was 40 years ago today and…

Stephen Semple:
Pretty much. Right? I didn’t even think about that.

Dave Young:
… 2023 is another tipping point. The pendulum has swung up, and we’re tipped back down in that direction again, but it’s just an interesting side trough. If you’re interested in these long cycles of societal change, look up that book, The Pendulum. It’s not the old story of The Pit and the Pendulum. It’s just the story of how society changes. Anyway, there’s a little rabbit trail people can shoot down if they want to.

Stephen Semple:
Yeah, it’s a real interesting, really interesting read. Here’s the thing that really struck me as what I learned when I was looking at this MTV lesson is Michael Nesmith was exploring, a super creative guy, saw the idea, they ran it and went, “Wow, there was a weird success here,” and they chased it down. It was an idea that was inspired from, “I did this creative thing and I got this result. Boy, oh, boy, there’s more to it here,” but the other thing that John Lack understood was, to make it work, they had to put themselves at the center. In other words, they had to figure out a way to make this work for the cable companies, for the record companies and for the advertisers. He understood he had to actually… and it wasn’t just enough to, “Oh, I got to put it out there. I actually have a plan for making this work.” He had a plan that he executed on to bring all of these pieces together.

I think, far too often, when we’re in a situation where people need these multiple pieces, we ignore that, no, you actually have got to plan to pull all this together. He knew he had to get content from the radio company, so he had to figure out a way to show that it was good for them. He understood that he had to get subscribers, so he created a campaign for that, and then he knew, when he got subscribers, he would be able to get the advertisers. The advertisers would come when he had the subscribers, but he had to empower the kids to ask for it. It was really brilliant what they did, and the final part is even proving to the record companies was not a straight line, and we see this a lot in advertising where they’ll go, “Oh, this happened, so therefore that’s what the result was.”

It would’ve been very easy for them to go into the record stores. They asked people buying in the record stores, “Where did you hear this album?” “I heard it on the radio.” It would’ve been very easy to go, “Okay. It was radio.” They took the next step and went to the radio stations and said, “Why are you guys playing this?” “It’s because of requests,” and then they looked at when did the requests come in. The requests came in after the album played on MTV. Often, in marketing, it is not a straight line.

Dave Young:
Exactly. Exactly.

Stephen Semple:
It is this domino effect, and they understood that and chased that down. That I think is something that should not be ignored in this story.

Dave Young:
I agree with you. A brilliant move because he knew they had… the proof that Michael Nesmith laid out was that people enjoy this kind of content, but nobody is making it because there’s no way to… You’re not going to get a 10-minute movie to show at your local movie theater. Nobody’s going to get in line to go watch a 10-minute movie, but you start sprinkling these onto cable TV and you create this little storm. He knew where to feed the fire. He knew that, okay, well, the people that have it really like it, and the people that don’t have it are going over to their friend’s house to watch it, and then they’re coming home and telling their parents they want it, and so it creates this little firestorm of desire. He had to feed that fire from multiple directions in order to turn it into a raging, spiraling firestorm of demand that it became. It was brilliant. It’s a great story.

Stephen Semple:
Dave, I want my MTV.

MTV Promo

Speaker 1:
Turn it on. Leave it on. America…

Speaker 2:
I want my MTV. All right.

Speaker 3:
I want my MTV. (singing)

I want my MTV.

Speaker 4:
24 hours a day on cable TV.

Speaker 5:
I want my MTV, MTV, MTV.

Speaker 6:
Yeah. Too much is never enough.

Dave Young:
Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us. Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five-star rating and review and, if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions@theempirebuilderspodcast.com

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