Music on television is in decline, in the early 1970s Top of the Pops pulled in 15 million viewers weekly. Now however there is only one constant music show on terrestrial television and the regular festival coverage. As the number of shows has fallen the quality has too; most music coverage on television is of appalling quality.
Most are so focused on the presenters they ignore the music totally, the amount of times you would hear “… are on stage behind us now” is infuriating as you sat through the presenters doing another badly planned and unfunny piece of scripted conversation. When they do finally show the band you are lucky if you get one song before another talking segment usually unlinked to music starts up. It seems that in the rush to justify the costs of the event the station will make it more of a journalistic event rather than a musical one and playing little music to save money on copyright and broadcast costs.
Also the presenters themselves tend to be uninformed in the subject matter, making any music discussion dull and uninteresting. More often than not the presenters of these shows are TV hosts and thus act like them, detached from what they are seeing. This also makes interview segments verge on physically painful. Interviews work best when the artist is engaged as well as the interviewer, so when you get a host who knows what they are doing, you end up with a good impression and a lot of information about the artist rather than the basic yes and no answer you get on a lot of music TV.
However, music television has declined for many reasons. The most common argument for why it failed was the start of dance music in the early 90s, which led to a decline in the shows visual interest; the production crew coined the term FDA or ‘faceless dance act’. The live music show’s golden age was the 1970s where glam rock was peaking, with interesting performers such as Marc Bolan and T-Rex as well as Bowie, all of whom could work a crowd and had stage presence. Also music television has been killed by new media. Why would someone wait to see a band on TV when a quick internet search could get you a few thousand live videos of any band you can think of (and a few thousand you won’t have done).
Music television should be simple, pick a good mix of music and let us watch them perform as they do live and make the interviews impassioned and interesting. Is that too much to ask?
By: Jonathon Greenall
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