![]() ![]() Making for a lot of PDs to conquer if a band wanted to have success. America was large and the media was all commercially owned. This is what made “cracking America” so difficult for bands. ![]() A band that could be popular in one locale might have a 500 mile dead zone until the next market where they were also popular. Subsequently, local program directors ruled the roost as gatekeepers to the airwaves. Diversity was still baked into the system. And before Ronald Reagan gutted the FCC’s stewardship of the telecom industries, there were hard limits on how many radio stations that one company could own. There were hundreds of individual radio stations. The interesting to see from a music fan perspective about MTV was that in America, radio broadcasting was a highly Balkanized operation. The cult act from 1981 was, in the space of the three months that MTV couldn’t stop playing “Hungry Like The Wolf,” catapulted into the US top ten for at least three years. They could not get enough “ Double Duran,” as J.J. The channel formed a symbiotic relationship with Duran Duran, for example. Once MTV got its legs and became an industry force, the low-price sampler album went the way of the dodo.Īll of a sudden, radio was starting to play some of my favorite bands which were “stars” on MTV. So the labels issued a lot of New Wave Samplers, usually at a loss-leader price to convince kids with a little pocket change to take a chance on these acts which were not getting airplay for love or money. Better to give the people what they want – “Stairway To Heaven” five time a day! And they knew they wanted it by the market research they paid for. It was still a great way to experience most new bands coming up through the channels, but as I noted in the pages of Billboard, the early desperate days of playing Slow Children clips was beginning to give away to playing a lot of pretty mainstream acts like Hall + Oates, who like many US pop stars and their labels, were responding to this new phenomenon.Īs an American, I couldn’t help but to notice the effect on the incredibly conservative US radio industry! I have mentioned before, that labels were signing scads of new acts but that radio was completely conservative in adding new acts to their valuable airwaves. MTV had the youth buzz and was the hippest thing going. There were so few advertisers in that first six months, that MTV would have unsold commercial blocs one to two minutes long, filled with stock footage placeholders that had instrumental stock music running under it!! By 1983 the channel was popping. As here was a new channel starving for something to fill the playlists and my favorite type of music just happened to be the deepest into music video production. It was a fascinating time to be a fan of New Wave music. So that meant that New Wave far outstripped any less interesting Rock Music at the time. Most of the industry was geared to UK bands, since they led the pack with video production, that meant that the great UK pop hits of the New Wave era were plentiful in comparison to…let say The Boss, who would not make a video for another year or so. Mostly weirdos and arty bands were making them in that time period. There was not that much to play, so they played a lot of obscure acts of the kind that I enjoyed. Maybe even the first six months.Įarly MTV was actually amazing. For the first three months, I had a tape cued in that deck at all times. I had a VCR and this was like being a drug addict with a 24/7 free supply. Then, one day in the fall of 1982, the channel was just there. I caught promos indicating that this was the MTV I’d read so much about in the pages of Billboard Magazine. MTV came some months later when I would try to see what channels were showing something interesting, only to discover that one of the blank channels on the unused upper end of the tuner was now playing music, but with no visual signal. I would imagine that when the first VCRs went on sale in 1975 those tapes must have been $29.98 each ! $12.99 as we noted in the comments yesterday was still the norm. Trust me, I did not see that one coming! I imagined that VCRs were outside of the family budget and never once broached the subject with my father. It came in 1982, the same year my dad surprised me by purchasing a refurb ßetamax VCR at the Sears outlet for the then cheap price of $400-500. My neighborhood was later to get cable TV, due to the underground electrical/phone conduit that made running cable more difficult than piggybacking on above-ground poles. ![]()
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