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MTV Website: 1999 vs 2011
Today, finding information about music is easily done through various methods. These methods include the internet, magazines, Spotify, Apple Music, etc. Nowadays, it is more common to find out about your favorite band through the internet or social media. While magazines still exist, they are not used as often as they used to be. In 1996, the website for MTV was launched. MTV, which stands for Music Television, is a channel that was created by Viacom in 1977. The cable channel was launched in 1981. The original idea was to have “music videos” playing 24/7 on the channel. Of course, music videos were not as common at the time. (I, Jaime, 2019).
In MTV’s website design during 1999, the website was a lot simpler than it is now. All the items on the page took up less space than they do now. The background color was black, which was accompanied by a green font. At least half of the website seemed to be blank. Even in 1999, the MTV website still had a drop-down feature that allowed users to access different parts of the website. Along with all of this the website has more news headlines in this version. The creation of the website was another way for MTV to reach new audiences.
In 2016, MTV’s website had a lot of differences. The main background color of the website was now white. The font used for headlines was a teal color. The other sections with text in them had a black background with white text. More notably, the website takes up the whole page and is not limited to about half of the screen. It still has a drop-down feature with links to other parts of the website where users can find different the newest information about music, shows, news, and movies. To bring attention to a particular music video, there is a picture with a caption describing the music. Clicking on the picture will lead you to the video. Compared to other websites, the changes in the MTV website from 1999 to 2011 do not seem that drastic.
Today, MTV’s cable channel is still around and hosts various TV shows. Some of the TV shows that MTV currently hosts are Fresh Out Live, and Ridiculousness. It appears MTV is less popular than it was at its peak, but it still has enough of an audience to still be a running cable channel. Along with the cable channel, the website is still up today and has its own differences when compared to the 1999 and the 2011 versions of the websites.
Works Cited
I, Jaime. 2019. “The History Of MTV & Birth Of The First Music Videos”. Everything 80’s podcast. February 16th, 2019.
“MTV Archive”. Wayback Machine. Internet Archive, 1999. https://web.archive.org/web/19991104023544/http://mtv.com/
“MTV Archive”. Wayback Machine. Internet Archive, 2011. https://web.archive.org/web/20111130210342/http://www.mtv.com/