Like many of you, I love music, and I think we can all agree that the best way to listen to our favorite music is to have total strangers interrupt a song, and for the song to never play in its entirety. MTV understood this need, and that's why they gave us Total Request Live (or TRL as the cool kids call it).
In the wake of an announcement by Viacom that it would be cutting nearly 250 jobs from its music networks, rumors began to circulate that TRL would be taken off the air, but according to a rep from MTV, those rumors are not true. Regardless, TRL has seen a decline as of late, and Variety reports that interactive sites like YouTube and MySpace are partly to blame, as they provide a more personal mode of interactivity.
Here's my advice for the people behind TRL: expand your focus. Why not air the State of the Union address interspersed with footage of kids in Times Square giving shout outs to their friends at home: "Yo yo, this is Sasha from Brooklyn and I just wanna say 'hey!' to my girl Mackenzie! Wooo! Two-party system! Rock on!"
Anyway, it's just a thought.
Thanks to Wild Bill for tipping me off.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
2-17-2007 @ 1:41AM
Preston said...
I think that TRL has declined ever since Carson Daly left the show a few years ago. There have been some respectable hosts like Brian, but everybody knows that Carson made TRL happen. Carson was more into harder rock bands than the mostly pop-driven songs that made the top 10. But he had an open mind about music. I like the very energetic audiences and screaming! They're known to retire videos after 65 days--they're not like Billboard, where songs stay on the charts for 20, 22 or 40 weeks. But the music scene changes a lot in 13 weeks--people move on to other artists and sounds and TRL has been smart to stay on track. One thing they should do--play the ENTIRE SONG! Instead of one minute! The network seldom plays any videos because they put all their money on those reality shows.
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