ABSTRACT
This book is concerned with rock videos as exhibited through Music Television - MTV - as an institution. What I have to say about rock videos only applies directly to their presentation within the MTV con text. The textual analyses naturally stand on their own to a degree, and points made in those parts of the book have implications beyond MTV as an institution. But the larger arguments about postmodern ism and spectatorship only make sense within the discussion of MTV as a commercial, popular institution, and as a specifically tele visual apparatus. I will briefly address both issues, whose full impli cations will emerge as the book progresses
MTV is a 24-hour, non-stop, commercial cable channel, beamed via satellite across the United States and devoted to presenting rock music videos around the clock. Originally owned by Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company (WASEC - the station has recently been purchased by Viacom International), MTV is an advertisersupported, basic cable service for which subscribers do not pay extra. As of Spring 1986, the channel reached 28 million house holds1 (it is available wherever there are cable systems to hook it up). The brain child of Robert Pittman, WASEC’s then Executive Vice President,2 MTV was begun in 1981 for an initial cost of $20 million. MTV earned $7 million in ad revenue in the first eighteen months, and in May 1983 the station already had 125 advertisers representing 200 products including Pepsico and Kellogg, that bought air time
for spots from 30 to 120 seconds at a cost of from $1500 to $6000.3 By 1984 the audience had grown to 22 million, aged between 12 and 34, and ad revenue had reached one million a week.4 By the end of 1983 the channel had $20 million in ad revenue, and figures for 1984 show more than one million a week in ad revenue, with an audience of 18 to 22 million.5
