Is it the end of an era for MTV?
The journalism arm of Music Television (MTV) removed two decades’ worth of new archives on the internet in June.
MTV started out as a cable television to showcase music videos of artists and bands. Eventually, this branched out to reality shows and music reporting.
Filipino online users commented about this as MTV News’ closure went viral last week.
“END OF AN ERA?!” Klasik Titos and Titas of Manila said on Facebook.
The post garnered 7,700 reactions and more than 1,500 shares.
While the Facebook page clarified that the music channel had only removed its online articles, some Pinoys believed that the entire company was shutting down.
“Sad day for Gen X peeps. This was our Spotify back in the day,” one person commented.
“Dito pa me noon nag aabang ng new song na idownload,” another Facebook user said.
“Di nila alam ang hirap ng batang 90’s kakahintay sa Favorite artist para lang mapanood music videos nila,” a commenter said with crying emojis.
However, other Pinoys have clarified that MTV as a whole is still alive despite many of its articles have been taken down.
“MTV News website [had shut down], not the entire MTV company/channel/entity,” one online user said.
“Reason to be sad for archivists,” another replied.
“So are they going to rewrite history soon all over again and take out these decades’ worth of digital evidence?” a Facebook user questioned.
The reason behind the website’s removal was due to MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Network’s consolidation last year.
Being MTV’s parent company, Paramount had to close down its news operations to make way for the merging of SHOWTIME and MTV Entertainment as one whole studio.
This resulted in hundreds of layoffs which eventually led to the withdrawal of news archives this year.
Thousands of stories and interviews with artists from the 1996 to present have been deleted due to this significant change. This included the “Mixtape Monday” column which was said to produce weekly hip-hop reports since 2000 and other musicians featuring their early careers.
MTV’s website, however, is still up and running but has turned into a streaming platform for its reality shows. Most of the series on the site are not available in the Philippines.
