MTV IN EUROPE

“ONE PLANET—ONE MUSIC.” Like so much of today’s advertising rhetoric, the phrase sounds like a revolutionary socialist slogan. Or, rather, since it sounds like one, we know it must be an advertisement. This particular phrase belongs to MTV Europe, a service that began transmission in August, in what is probably the most important step along the road to a world television system since Rupert Murdoch’s attempt to set up a “fourth network” in the U.S. (adding the Fox system to his TV interests in Australia and Europe).

Music is, after all, the perfect commodity for the development of world television. Like no other format, with the possible exception of sports, it translates easily across national boundaries. And it’s free programming, too. The record companies pay for the videos out of advertising budgets. Never in the history of television has its impulse to sell been so perfectly expressed. In the new media-pop world, Michael Jackson gets paid for a TV special that simultaneosly sells an album, a video and cans of soda pop. This gigantic three-way advertisement is then sold, to TV companies throughout the world. It’s the perfect marketing circle.

This is the world MTV was built for. Flushed with the economic success of its retreat into heavy metal programming, MTV is the cash cow that will underwrite global music television, it already has a toe in the international waters of Japan, Mexico and Australia, where chunks of the service air on network TV. But MTV Europe is the first attempt to take the whole package into foreign markets. From this summer on, the Intelsat V satellite will beam a Euro-version of MTV to cable and satellite viewers, 24 hours a day, from London to Amsterdam to Paris to Zurich to Berlin to Copenhagen. With around 1,300,000 viewers in its first week, MTV Europe eventually hopes for an audience of 5-7 million subscribers. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before a combination of imperialist greed and Soviet glastnost herald the very first broadcast of MTV Moscow. One planet, one music, comrade.

A thoroughly unglamorous and rather likeable American, Mark Booth, is MTV Europe’s 30-year-old managing director, and like all MTV spokespersons he’s obliged to trot out the usual cliches: “Young people understand technology intuitively. . .there’s a television revolution going on.. .the traditional generation gap in music is dissipating...” Etcetera, etcetera. But he also has some shrewd ideas for translating MTV into a European format.

“As long as music and television are important and are used by young people, we will have a fine business.”

—Mark Booth

As Booth explains, MTV Europe’s programming won’t be an attempt at musical imperialism: “Musically, America is very different from Europe. In New York or San Francisco you have probably 60 to 75 radio stations. And what you have are very defined formats and a very defined ear. In Europe you have two to three radio stations targeted towards young people in each market. And what you have is a broader range of music.”

MTV Europe has to respond to those differences, because 24-hour Bon Jovision won’t work: “The look remains the same, but the set and the music are very different. And the attitude we project*on air is very different... It’s going to differ in two ways. It’s not so difficult to stand out on television here. I think we’ll be sexier. And I think, musically, we’ll have a very broad range of music.”

Certainly it’s clear once you watch MTV Europe that something a little different is going on. The service makes a virtue of the potential trans-national language problems by being even more visual than its Yankee counterpart. The Europeanwide nature of the service is promoted via mini-travelogues put to music, featuring a pastiche of “Paris,” “London” or “Munich.” The European VJs are introduced by worldless clips featuring music and images.

The playlist is also more adventurous than the I’m-a-Bud-kinda-guy world of its parent station. Mark Booth dismisses charges of racism directed at MTV too easily (“I think it’s really dropped out as an issue in the States”), but is nonetheless happy to note that “there is more of a market in Europe for R&B.” Black music is more prominent in the opening weeks of MTV Europe than anywhere on white American TV. The new service opens, predictably enough, with Dire Straits crawling their way into heavy rotation with “Money For Nothing,” but moves directly into the clip for Alexander O’Neal’s “Fake.” Thereafter Prince, Whitney Houston, Luther Vandross, Atlantic Starr and the Jacksons Michael and Janet are all featured prominently. Even Mantronix gets a look in.

The MTV Europe team believes their service is more visual, more adventurous and potentially more diverse than the American service that spawned it. No one wants to say so on record, but it’s obvious that the London-based team hope they will make an impact on MTV USA and thus improve the quality of that service. London and New York will exchange some programming, concert footage and news items. The European contingent hopes to shift the ossified rockist format of MTV America by revealing the potential for a less restricted format.

With less than 200,OCX) homes cabled up in the whole of Britain, MTV’s prospects there aren’t exactly rosy. Advertising in the early days has been nearly all American (Levis, Coca-Cola) and included ads for New York Seltzer—a commodity that is nearly as hard to get hold of in Britain as MTV itself. The cable audience in other European countries is more substantial (99 percent of the homes in Amsterdam now receive MTV), but the match between cable and music markets isn’t very tight. The big music markets (Britain and Germany) have relatively low penetration of cabled households. The heavily-cabled nations (Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg) are minor music markets. The only exception is the heavily-cabled, music-crazy population of The Netherlands, which explains why MTV’s launch party took place at the Roxy club in Amsterdam.

Mark Booth remains optimistic: “As long as music and television are important and are used by young people, we will have a fine business... We don’t operate on television broadcast standards. We’re not looking for a 20 share. We only need one percent of the people to watch our product to have a great business. We can do that.”

I don’t doubt they can. But the key question concerns whether or not the record companies will continue to finance it, by providing big-budget highproduction value video clips free of charge. Recently a number of industry figures have found themselves in an unusual alliance with rock critics in an attempt to talk down the future of music television.

Rock critics have been accusing MTV/music video of “selling out” since its very inception. (Selling out what, the revolutionary spirit of rock ’n’ roll? Give me a break.) More importantly, record company people have begun hinting that music video doesn’t sell enough records, that the industry doesn’t need pictures. MTV’s declining ratings last year, coupled with the decisions by some acts (usually ugly ones) not to make videos, were seen as proof that the music television bubble had burst.

Whether the record business can really afford to abandon promotional videos remains to be seen. I doubt it myself. But the more interesting question, given the obvious popularity and potential of music video, is what new forms might be around the corner. Direct sales of non-promotional clips on compact disc formats (such as the CD-V) are expected to begin this year. Will we also see music videos produced by TV companies? Digital video music integrated into interactive computer games?

When I ask Mark Booth if MTV Europe contemplates producing its own music videos, his answer is very revealing: “I don’t think so. I don’t think you want to compete with your customers.” Let’s rewind that and run it again: “I don’t think so. I don’t think you want to compete with your customers.”

So who are the customers here? Obviously, the record companies. But if the record companies are the customers, what’s the product? There is only one candidate: you. The TV audience is the product, sold to the customers (CBS, EMI, etc.) by the salespeople: MTV. The point of the sale is to deliver TV viewers to advertisers, and record buyers to the usic business. That’s the real problem

ith music video right now. Not its form or its format, but its finance; its dependence on a promotional function, rather than a “creative” one.

But perhaps this is the media future, an international TV system offering programs that are actually ads, local services that are really dependent on decisions made in New York and Los Angeles. The consumer as product. The multi-national as your friendly neighborhood TV company.

And if that sounds a shade Orwellian, consider this: In MTV Europe’s London offices there is a poster on the wall, featuring a bunch of cows in a field and the slogan “THE WHOLE WORLD’S WATCHING.” That catchphrase was, of course, first heard in 1968, when it was chanted by the students protesting the police brutality against them at the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. The students were invoking a sense of responsibility (stop this violence, the world is watching you on the TV news), not evading it. But in MTV’s closet-classic rewrite of political history, it means something else: watching TV is just like chewing the cud in a field. The whole world is watching, but with no purpose other than passing time. Perhaps someone in MTV’s publicity department subconsciously recalled the famous description of TV as “chewing gum for the eyes.”

Or maybe they had another slogan in mind; “MTV—WE’RE MAKING IT UP AS WE GO ALONG.”