The Future of Music Television
This is not, of course, a decisive tract on the future of music television, as much as a continuation of this particular conversation started on radar.scotsman, with me taking the chance to add my tuppence-worth.
I’ve been thinking about this kind of thing for some time now, for a couple of reasons. Partly because there really is just no music television to be had anywhere at the moment, partly because I am trying to figure out what we are doing with our own video stuff here at Song, by Toad and partly because of the fact that even though Mrs. Toad and I don’t have an actual telly in the house, we have iTunes and we have the internet, so we still manage to watch all the television we please.
As Nick points out in the Radar post, all we really have at the moment “aside from wall-to-wall videos of gyrating flesh and head-nodding geezers on 24-hour music channels – is the box-ticking predictability of Later… with Jools Holland, the odd brand marketing vehicle pretending to be an unsigned showcase and those genre nights on BBC4 which, though excellent, focus resolutely on the past.”
The brand vehicles masquerading as unsigned talent showcases irritate the living shit out of me actually. They are nothing more than companies exploiting hopeful young musicians to do their advertising work for them, and I would personally recommend you steer well clear of the fucking things. I think they’re exploitative, vacuous and of almost no use to your career in the long run.
I will say, however, that I think Jools Holland gets a bad rap, to be honest. Yes, he’s personally irritating, and yes, if you’re very into music it’s all pretty predictable stuff, but it’s not really aimed at readers of Drowned in Sound (never mind Radar or Toad) so I think it should get a bit more respect both for being pretty good for what it is, and for being the last bastion of music television left, of almost any sort.
In any case, the current state of music television is so bad that MTV have recently performed the ultimate feat of self-parody, in starting a new channel called MTV Music. Yes, that’s right. Music Television Music.
I was talking to a friend from the BBC about this recently, and the basic reason for the lack of decent music programming is extremely simple: music on television simply doesn’t pay. It can’t keep the viewers to attract the advertisers, so it doesn’t exist. Then when you think about how much talk there’s been in the music industry of late about splintered audiences disappearing up their own niches, you can imagine that doesn’t exactly make life easier. Personally, I think that traditional music shows on linear, programmed television are basically dead.
The only remaining solid audience for alternative music is on the internet, and the biggest identifiable clusters there (i.e. the biggest markets, and hence the most obvious targets for someone trying to resurrect the concept of music television) are places like Pitchfork or Drowned in Sound, but I still don’t think those audiences are big enough to justify pitching a relatively mainstream, prime time TV show at – at least, one which eschews the childish bollocks of E4 on Saturday or the point-and-laugh exploitation of idiots on the X-Factor.
What they might be worth testing with – and this is what I was discussing with my BBC friend – is something more internet-based, for the extremely simple reason that the costs are so much lower, the need to find a gigantic audience immediately just isn’t there.
Something Radar touched on, but didn’t really tackle, were the ways in which this is already beginning to happen; ways which I personally think are going to be the way music television will work in the future, and something we ourselves have been rather haphazardly taking aim at for a little while now.
At the moment, Song, by Toad offers a breadth of music video content, from the more mundane live video recordings, to the more interesting live webcasts of our house gigs, festival diaries, interviews with bands passing through Edinburgh and of course the ten minute Toad Session videos (rough TV shows, essentially) to go with the song videos and interviews which comprise the main sessions.
Now, cobble that together in the right way, and you effectively have a TV channel already. Certainly the content is there or thereabouts, with the interviews, artist profiles and festival coverage. It would be nice to get some more up to date news and some debate and stuff, but that is much more complicated to do, so we don’t try just yet. But the way a great many people consume media these days, it seems there will soon be little difference in delivery between someone’s cute video of their cat dancing to Paul Simon, the Song, by Toad video content, the streaming media provided by more professional channels, and the kind of traditional TV programming which is already available through things like the iPlayer and iTunes. Throw in the ability to neatly aggregate all the feeds you want, or people you want to follow, and you’re pretty much there.
Now, what we are doing, of course, is basically just the work of one person with some very basic equipment, limited time, and what what little help he can get as and when he can get it, which brings me back to the BBC: why start with a television programme, when you can start on the internet? As Nick quite rightly pointed out on Radar, the BBC are already halfway there, with their excellent online festival coverage, so why not go the whole hog and expand it. Why not pilot an attempt to return to the field of music television on iPlayer, where things can be done cheaply, and the risk is incredibly low.
Hell, if you want to start really slowly, just video the sessions people are already recording for 6Music and the BBC Introducing shows, edit them together like we do the Toad Sessions, and post those on the website related to that show – or better yet, somewhere more centralised. The beauty of the internet is that you can experiment in relative obscurity before you really start to publicise it. This point was well made by skinnygirlwho in the comments on that Radar piece, and is worth expanding upon: no-one knows what kind of music show would work at the moment, in terms of length, breadth, style, format or anything, so it would need to be able to shift quite quickly if something clearly was or wasn’t working.
All in all, it seems too easy when put like this, if you ask me. A little cash, an established, relevant brand (i.e. NOT Red Bull or Miller, thanks), the room to experiment and Bob’s yer uncle. But there are some obvious drawbacks of course.
Firstly, within the Beeb at least, there are numerous internal obstacles to overcome. The company is just too big, and that sort of thing rarely ever makes for nimble innovation – mind you they did invent the iPlayer, so they’re hardly incapable. It may not need to be the BBC, but I can’t see an independent production company doing something like this speculatively, so it would have to be driven by a relatively prominent media channel, I think.
Secondly, of course, is that age-old enemy of innovation: the intellectual property gold rush. Getting rights holders to agree to anything this new and unknown would be a nightmare – possibly the biggest obstacle of all, in my view. They would probably be so scared of someone else’s success that their financial demands would be prohibitively high. Most music license-holders are still scarred by what iTunes did for Apple, for example. Napster pointed the way to the market, the music companies dithered and bickered, and Apple cleaned up – that could have been us, dammit!
So I am not saying there aren’t obstacles to be overcome, but I do strongly believe that people looking to resurrect music television should not just be looking to copy the best bits of old programmes, although that’s a good start. What they should really be doing is looking at what television is starting to become, and starting to think about the opportunities that might give them to sidestep the pitfalls which killed off traditional music programmes.
Scissor Sisters – Tits on the Radio
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