Music History Archives Gone

Internet Archive WayBack Machine Saves Much Content

MTV Takes Down Archives of MTVNews and CMT

More than two decades’ worth of content published on MTVNews.com¹ (originally an initialism of Music Television) is no longer available after MTV has pulled down the site and its related content. Content on its sister site, Country Music Television² (CMT.com) seems to have met a similar fate.³

The now-unavailable content includes decades of music journalism comprising thousands of articles and interviews with countless major artists, dating back to the site’s launch in 1996. Perhaps the most significant loss is MTV News’ vast hip-hop-related archives, particularly its weekly “Mixtape Mondays” column, which ran for nearly a decade in the 2000s and 2010s and featured interviews, reviews and more with many artists, producers and others early in their careers.⁴

Paramount shut down the MTV News division as part of a larger round of layoffs in May 2023. In recent weeks, amid ongoing financial challenges, the company took MTV News content offline as well as thousands of CMT articles and it also purged video content from Comedy Central’s site.

Some reactions:

• Endless work by countless people has been deleted due to streamer consolidation, incompetence. (dailydot).

• MTV News archives pulled offline. Years of music journalism lost. Fans and former staff express outrage. (Los Angeles Magazine)

• So, MTVNews archives no longer exists. Eight years of my life are gone without a trace. All because it didn't fit some executives' bottom lines. Infuriating is too small a word. (Patrick Hosken).

If you want your MTV, it just got a lot harder to find. ⁵

Internet Archive adds MTV News Repository After Paramount’s Content Takedown

The not-for-profit Internet Archive assembled a searchable index of 479,020 web pages previously published at mtv.com/news. You can search the MTV News archive on the organization’s Wayback Machine at this link.

The Wayback Machine’s archive of MTV News, which appears to go back to at least 1997, is not the full complement of what was published over the span of more than two decades. In addition, some images in the archived pages of MTV News on the service are unavailable. But the new collection at least ensures, for the time being, that much of MTV News’ articles remain accessible in some form.⁶

Digital Archiving isn’t Cheap

At the Scholarly Kitchen David Crotty explains the cost and complexity of Digital Archiving⁷ using Wikipedia as an example.

Librarians know that preservation of culture and memory is a very long game.

Krummel, D. W. Fiat Lux, Fiat Latebra: A Celebration of Historical Library Functions. Occasional Paper No. 209. -the changing and cumulative institutional functions of libraries in Western civilization, tracing "The Seven Ages of Librarianship" from the working archives created by emerging civilizations through contemporary libraries that serve as instruments for social change. The metaphors of "lux" (light) and "latebra" (refuge) are used to characterize how the library serves today's communities.⁸

(This Substack is devoted to The Preservation and Annihilation of Memory.)

1. MTV - Wikipedia

2. CMT - Wikipedia

3. Spangler, Todd. MTV News Website Goes Dark, Archives Pulled Offline; Paramount Global also has removed content from CMT’s site. Variety, Jun 24, 2024.

4. Ibid.

5. Powel, James. MTV deletes news archives from internet, erasing over two decades of articles. USA Today. June 26, 2024

6. Spangler, Ted. MTV News Repository of Nearly 480,000 Articles Launched by Internet Archive After Paramount’s Content Takedown. Variety, July 2, 2024.

7. Crotty, David. Digital Archiving, and What Would it Cost to Print an Always Up-to-date Version of Wikipedia. The Scholarly Kitchen, July 19, 2024.

8. Krummel, D. H. (1999). Fiat Lux, Fiat Latebra: A Celebration of Historical Library Functions. Occasional Papers, 209. Urbana, IL.: Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois.