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The Internet Music

MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline (variety.com) 67

Posted by BeauHD from the end-of-an-era dept.
MTVNews.com has been shut down, with more than two decades' worth of content no longer available. "Content on its sister site, CMT.com, seems to have met a similar fate," adds Variety. From the report: In 2023, MTV News was shuttered amid the financial woes of parent company Paramount Global. As of Monday, trying to access MTV News articles on mtvnews.com or mtv.com/news resulted in visitors being redirected to the main MTV website.

The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site's launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News' vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly "Mixtape Monday" column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers. "So, mtvnews.com no longer exists. Eight years of my life are gone without a trace," Patrick Hosken, former music editor for MTV News, wrote on X. "All because it didn't fit some executives' bottom lines. Infuriating is too small a word."

"sickening (derogatory) to see the entire @mtvnews archive wiped from the internet," Crystal Bell, culture editor at Mashable and one-time entertainment director of MTV News, posted on X."decades of music history gone... including some very early k-pop stories."

"This is disgraceful. They've completely wiped the MTV News archive," longtime Rolling Stone senior writer Brian Hiatt commented. "Decades of pop culture history research material gone, and why?"

The report notes that some MTV News articles may be available via internet archiving services like the Wayback Machine. However, older articles aren't available.
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MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline More

MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline

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  • I didn't even know MTV had a news site.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      You probably think MTV still shows music videos

      • Skeptical of a bunch of an industry specific group of writers lamenting the loss of a

        - former employer
        - possible future employer
        - jobs for people in the same writing industry who will now be competing with the writers for jobs

        Agree on preserving the articles for future generations. Though I remember hearing that in the 1970s local radio DJs would 'interview' bands on tour by asking a question and then playing a cut from a vinyl record with a prerecorded answer. Source anyone?

        Reading music interviews one w

      • To be fair that's when I stopped watching them. They became irrelevant 25+ years ago what 20 year old news article is worth saving

        Fat junkie Jersy slut shows pussy while getting out of Brittany's shifty ass old used mec?

        • I was actually initially a little upset about this...as that I remember vividly the "I want my MTV" days as a teen.

          However when I read this:

          Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News' vast hip-hop-related archives

          Maybe it IS a good thing to bury this and forget the mistakes of the past.

      • Yes, this is what I think. Last remember seeing MTV was in the early 90s, when that was what they did. Usually playing on a mute TV above the counter in a bar.

      • Yeah - it did in 1986, which is about the last time I watched it.

  • Wow (Score:3)

    by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @07:13PM (#64578309)

    Good on Viacom for shaving $10 off that yearly electricity bill!

  • showing that any celebrity was willing to talk to someone with a MTV logo on their mic.

  • 8 years of his life are gone without a trace? Did he not get paid for that work?
  • This is how history ends. Orwell was an optimist, we don't need a Ministry of Truth to delete the past.
  • I highly doubt many people were looking to read album reviews from 2003.

    • Re: Don't expect a large protest over this (Score:4, Insightful)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @07:58PM (#64578431) Journal
      I do. I've also read reviews of Beethoven's premier symphony performances, written in newspapers. It's an important part of music history. Of course, all of us create works that are temporary, but sometimes it's worth saving.

      • I also enjoy reading weird archives at the library or old web stuff on wayback. Heck I would have enjoyed some of these articles even but these people think very highly of themselves. You can see it as he laments the loss of early k-pop history as if the articles he wrote for MTV contain information that's not likely better recorded somewhere in Korea.

        Now when the file libraries of Compuserve and AOL were deleted. That was like burning down the fucking library of Alexandria!

    • As a complement to the other comment; everything musically important in 19th Century German music is commented in the weekly Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung and its opinions are still read and cited today. It was published by Breitkopf & Härtel, who also published sheet music from all major composers. In this sense there is a strong parallel with MTV, which broadcasted videoclips from all famous musicians of the late 20th Century, and hosted a review website.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mattr ( 78516 )

        Interesting information, thank you.

        Maybe the Library of Congress should be required to archive things that most people interested in a subject would consider needing of archiving. Wayback is one thing but the LOC is not going to get sued. They even have a 3D scanning project so they could archive models too I bet.. They do video and websites but unfortunately when I searched for mtv found only a small number.

        https://www.loc.gov/search/?in... [loc.gov]

        FAQ:

        https://www.loc.gov/programs/w... [loc.gov]

        Is the Library legally require

  • If a piece of music was historically significant, then it will have been written about in a book. Who dated who's publicist in November of 2013 is not of historic value. Most political articles aren't worth much either

    • It's incredibly important to the kind of people whining about it and they're sure that them and their pals were the center of the universe and most interesting people of the year 1991 or whatever. Really funny that none of these people felt like it was their job to archive this incredibly precious information.

      Also lol @ "so much early k-pop" like I'm sure people in korea have much better record of that shit than MTV.

    • "If a piece of music was historically significant, then it will have been written about in a book."

      Bit of a shallow take. Not everything worth saying has been put into book form within twenty years of the subject. I would say most has not, since society doesn't exactly fall all over itself to fund scholarly work in the first place. If you have to spend weeks and months personally contacting librarians and archivists to assemble a picture of what you're investigating, that makes your project a lot less l

      • These kinds of people write everything down in a book and self publish it if they have to. I knew a lady who was a nothing groupie and was divorced from a ... well not a star but sort of famous, but anyhow married to him for like 2 years and she talked about it constantly even though it was all ages ago. she considered herself an artist and tastemaker but her most creative endeavor was smoking meth and redecorating her home with shit from goodwill...

        well anyhow I digress someone else in that small little

        • We can say with some confidence the vast majority of books ever printed (even confining it to the last 100 years) have long been out of print, and that the majority of those have no surviving physical copies. Whether those texts survive in other forms is difficult to know in most cases. An online database rewards random exploration, which tends to yield more surprising insights than more directed / academic projects trying to find something specific.

  • Here are the first four hours of MTV [archive.org] when it debuted on August 1, 1981. Enjoy.

  • New Legal Provision (Score:4, Insightful)

    by The Cat ( 19816 ) on Tuesday June 25, 2024 @09:05PM (#64578543)

    If you "un-publish" a copyrighted work, the copyright expires immediately.

    Since copyright is a commercial privilege, if there is no commerce, legally speaking, copyright is protection against nothing.

    The Constitution does not grant Congress the power to aid copyright holders in removing ideas from public discourse.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mezion ( 936475 )
      I agree, I feel this is something that needs to be clarified in copyright law. Too many companies claim they have copyright due to existence, regardless of accessibility, but do not want to wear storage and reproduction costs. As I understood, this used to be borne by public libraries/national archive, until such companies claimed such work was too burdensome to store "temporary work", while retaining their exclusionary copying rights and rights to sue for infringement.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I agree, I feel this is something that needs to be clarified in copyright law. Too many companies claim they have copyright due to existence, regardless of accessibility, but do not want to wear storage and reproduction costs. As I understood, this used to be borne by public libraries/national archive, until such companies claimed such work was too burdensome to store "temporary work", while retaining their exclusionary copying rights and rights to sue for infringement.
        Flag as Inappropriate

        To be fair, the l

  • except perhaps the chance to remove two opther types of music (disputed) archives also at the same time Country & Western m'am
  • I don't see that as a loss...... different strokes for different folks. I think I missed that MTVNews.com even existed.
  • ... yawn ...

  • We see these kinds of things often enough that it bears repeating and thinking about: There is a definite and hard distinction between content that only exists online and what I would think of a "real" content that can be counted on to exist for extended periods of time.

    When I was in college (good Lord, more than 2 decades ago now...ugh) I wrote a couple English papers based on scholarly articles from older journals (somewhere between the '20s and '40s) because the subject of those papers was old fiction th

  • Anyway.

  • Perhaps the most significant loss... (Score:3)

    by kryliss ( 72493 ) on Wednesday June 26, 2024 @08:56AM (#64579501)

    Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News' vast hip-hop-related archives... So nothing of value was lost, but to be fair, MTV lost all value when they got rid of the M in MTV.

  • There is always an odd thing about old stuff being destroyed (see the other story about the computer museum). Is it history or clutter?

  • My conspiracy theory is that some GenAI business plans to monetize the content which nobody else can have now. A lot of money may be changing hands for this.

  • During the Xanadu project, Ted Nelson referred to this as "The Library of Alexandria Problem", one of several things the Xanadu hypertext design was intended to avoid.

    The architecture of the current web amounts to having one copy of each book, each sitting on a server somewhere, and a lot of infrastructure to allow people all over the world to read it, or perhaps ephemeral caches of it. Great while it lasts. But that means if the server dies, the book vanishes, immediately from the bulk of the internet, e

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