My guitar teacher and I discussed recently why a lot of metal bands shoot music videos these days. It's kind of weird, since no place will air them.
MTV and MuchMusic (Canada's equivalent to MTV) used to air music videos mostly. Then MTV got more and more shows which were non-music related.
10 years ago, MuchMusic was 90% music videos and 10% other stuff. Now it's pretty much the other way around, or at least close enough to it. Their music video based shows got pushed to late at night. Now LOUD (their show with heavier music) and The Punk Show are gone.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, LOUD was often being pre-empted every few weeks for something like a live show with someone like Britney Spears (something LOUD's target audiences are not interested in) or something which was usually aired at another time that week anyways.
LOUD's viewers got really upset many, many years ago when it was shortened from a full hour to a half hour. A few years later when it used to be aired in the weekends late at night, it got pushed to weekdays late at nights. Viewers claimed that MuchMusic was purposely trying to make the show pander to no audience. Something tells me MuchMusic was trying to irritate LOUD's viewers.
Also, they announced the arrival of specialty channels linked to MuchMusic many years ago. They had a MuchLOUD channel (only available in Ontario, whereas the other specialty channels were available on cable throughout Canada), and you'd think they'd be pandering to the metal oriented audience based on the fact it was named after the metal show. But no, it was more radio rock (Nickelback, Creed, etc.) and pop-punk stuff with very little metal stuff. They should have named the channel something else, because a lot of people were led to believe it would be a predominantly metal/hardcore punk type station, when it couldn't be further from it.
The Punk Show, which debuted many years after LOUD did, was also aired late at nights, and what was really weird is that a lot of what I remember seeing on it when I watched it wasn't punk. It wasn't pop-punk, either, which is what you'd probably assume when I said most of it wasn't punk. Most of the bands aired on the episodes I saw sounded more like indie rock to me. However, a lot of the bands I am not familiar with, so some of them probably were punk bands at another point of their career and changed styles, with the video being aired being in the non-punk style. That, or maybe they actually had members of punk bands in them, hence being punk by association.
Subject: Heretic "A Time Of Crisis" promo video 
Thu Jul 05, 2012 12:59 pm
