Rap killed the other music genres on MTV in the late 80’s-early 90’s.
Some knuckleheads complained that MTV wasn’t playing enough black music, and you know very well just how potent the race card is. MTV caved.
I used to love watching MTV in its early days, but when they switched the majority of their videos to rap, that was the end for me.
While rap was a dead end street, it had something that the rest of pop music lacked—no association with the big record labels.
One of the worst ideas of the suicidally bad ideas produced by the RIAA was that MTV should pay huge royalties for the privilege of showing music videos that were commercials for the RIAA.
This fits right in with the RIAA business paradigm that the record companies should get all the money from music, at zero cost to them. None for the artists, none for the print media, TV or radio stations. The RIAA wants every dime.
For years they had included a contract clause in music contracts that the composers and artists were nothing more than “fee for hire”, so deserved no royalties of any kind. Essentially minimum wage slobs. But they had not enforced that clause. So they got congress to pass a special bill to insure that no artist had any claim to anything, that the record company didn’t freely give them. That the clause was still good.
Now they are pushing congress to pass a law that radio stations can’t air their music without paying huge royalties as well. On top of that, that anyone airing music, even public domain music, should be assumed to be airing copyrighted music, and have to pay royalties for it, unless they could prove that the music was public domain after the fact.
They also want to overturn the old ruling that cassette and VHS recording of copyright material for personal use should be legal. That all music is essentially their property.
Holy heck. I don’t think that even demons in Hell could be that insanely greedy.