At the stroke of the midnight hour on August 1, 1981, the United States of America awoke to a television revolution AKA MTV! One of MTV’s creators John Lack declared, “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll”, and with those first words he played the first music video to be aired on cable TV, Video Killed the Radio Star by The Buggles.
MTV gave us the term VJs (video jockeys) who would introduce the music video that played on MTV, which stands for Music Television. Soon, music videos became THE thing and MTV went on to revolutionise many other things about the music industry. It is even known to have made the careers of artists like Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince and several others.
Within a year, MTV garnered two million viewers and today, has a global viewership of over a billion with its own shows, programme formats and whatnot.
In the year 1996, MTV India came to our country. Subsequently, it gave us reality shows like Roadies, daily shows like Kitni Mast Hai Zindagi and was every bit as revolutionary as it ought to be.
When was the last time you tuned to MTV? Today would surely be a good day to do so.
