A look into what happened to the MTV archives online
A few weeks ago, MTV was nearly wiped out online. The good stuff anyway. Journalists who spent decades writing about all thing’s music were shocked when they found out, in late June, that years of research and historical documentation was just gone. The short of it is that the music channel’s news operation was shut down in 2023 as a part of a layoffs conducted by MTV’s parent company Paramount Global. The layoffs cut roughly 25% of jobs from companies owned by Paramount.
Multiple former MTV news staffers took to social media to mourn the loss of their former workplace as others criticized the removal of the collected works.
The links to mtvnews.com and mtv.com/news began to redirect to MTV’s homepage, Variety reported on June 24th. CMT also had decades of material erased from its website a few weeks before that as well.
On a smaller scale, we here at Rock Oracle can completely relate. Our website was hacked a little over a month ago as someone got into the mainframe (or however it happens) and dropped malware into our site and took down our entire operation. Obviously, we are no MTV, but to wake up and find out all your hard work is gone is absolutely heartbreaking. We had to start from scratch as our host site claimed there was no recovering any of our stories via the attack. It took weeks of long days, by our staff, to mostly get our site back up and running again.
So, I can fully understand the criticism and anger of these music journalists whom not only had their editorials eliminated, but they were cut down internally. The company never sent out a formal announcement ahead of time, nor a reason why this happened. Several major news outlets and magazines were all left asking the same questions. Why did Paramount executives pull the plug on two of the biggest music journalist archival systems on the internet? Where has all this music history gone? Well, we do not have a why, but most of the material is now back online.
And who can we thank for this? The answer is the non-profit Internet Archive who has created a searchable index of MTV News via its Wayback Machine. The database has 460,575 web pages previously published at mtv.com/news dating all the way back to the website’s inception in 1996. Unfortunately, much like when our tiny footprint was lost in the ethos, not all material has been fully recovered, especially photos that were uploaded to the site.
This new digital stockpile at least protects and makes the majority of MTV News’ articles accessible in some format. This includes MTV News’ well-known “Mixtape Mondays” which is a super popular weekly hip-hop column and a deep concern for people on social media platforms. A search generated on the Wayback Machine revealed nearly 3,000 results for that specific listing.
Michael Alex, who founded and led MTV’s Digital Group from 1994 until 2007, said in a public statement, that he is encouraged by the current project. “It’s incomplete, but it’s very impressive,” he said. “It’s like a treasure when you find something you’re looking for.”
As for the copyright concern? The Internet Archives describes its copyright policy for the Wayback Machine in this context; “The Internet Archive respects the intellectual property rights and other proprietary rights of others. The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others.” The organization asserts that their collection of material falls under the fair use doctrine.
I usually write an article, sleep on it, go back and edit or scrap it, and today I am glad that I stuck to my routine as a few statements were made by Paramount staff and execs in the following day of my original write-up.
One such person told Variety that “the cost of maintaining the sites — which received very low traffic — was greater than digital ad revenue they produced. Currently, Paramount Media Networks, which houses the cable network brands and related digital services, is exploring how to it might be able to make MTV News content available publicly in a more efficient way.”
Regarding Paramount Global’s execution of all articles from MTV News, a company spokesperson said, “As part of broader website changes across Paramount, we have introduced more streamlined versions of our sites.” The representative continued to say, “All MTV News content is being preserved in a non-public archive.” So that really helps out the content contributors and the readers.
The bottom line seems to be that Paramount Global is in the midst of some real financial trouble. Last year, Paramount Global’s long-term debt was $14.6 billion and a few weeks ago its stock hit an all-time low. It’s unclear if Paramount plans to sell MTV or its other cable channels like Nickelodeon, but a few days ago it was disclosed publicly that the company may jettison BET for $1.6 billion to that network’s CEO.
So, the positive news is that a good portion of the lost archives have been preserved, for now. But for how long? And who is next? Music is not dead, nor will it die, and with new music and bands and venues and festivals- come new articles by journalists who want to spread the word of what is happening in the scene. Please support them and support live music, so that the stories can continually be told.
