If you want your MTV, you’ve got it back. The Internet Archive and Wayback Machine has restored the archives of MTV News (and VICE, while we’re on the subject) shortly after their corporate overlords nuked everything. It’s a move crucial to research – and pleasantly wasting time online.
It’s a tale as old as time. Corporate conglomerate owner decides out of the blue to delete decades of work from the internet, and just like that, it’s gone. (I’ve watched that happen to my work, even.)
Paramount Global recently deleted decades of MTV News (and, not that anyone cared, CMT). Staffers were horrified, particularly with archives like Mixtape Mondays. Fortunately, the folks at Internet Archive have come to our rescue with a dedicated, searchable archive.
You’ll find the usual snapshots at Wayback Machine, which is interesting enough – just enter any MTV address and choose a date, with a brief snapshot all the way back to 1997. But you also now have a separate archive for MTV News, which is even available on the main website:
VICE is there, too, having suffered some corporate abuse of its own – that one-two punch of layoffs and site content deletion.
For the heck of it, here’s what MTV’s homepage looked like on the day CDM launched – October 27, 2004. (I should add that I am now 140 years old. Whether I’m an alien or a vampire or – hey, why not both? – I’ll leave to you.)
Here’s some exciting news, too:
Apple’s Beefed-Up New iPod Also Stores Digital Photos
Hmm, black and red U2 edition, you say?
Of course, part of me now wants to set up an emulator and install Flash Player and … this was all supposed to be for research or culture or something. I’m going to stop now before I get sucked in.
Seriously, this is a boon. Now that assumes that this doesn’t wind up hung up in court somewhere. Internet Archive’s lending library feature lost an appeal late last month (though it seems they are still keeping the rest of the site running, minus the books they had available to lend):
What happened last Friday in Hachette v. Internet Archive?
MTV News, for its part, is older than this archive. If you want to feel really old, here’s MTV News with a then relatively unknown RuPaul just … going to the mall? Sheesh, we should stop complaining about influencers; making “content” used to be so much easier in some ways.
Watch to the end, though: “the change is going to happen with or without me. Love yourself.”
The “world domination” thing worked out pretty well.
One last dose of nostalgia – 1988. Should we just bring back this format, no explanation? Same production values. (Ah, “are magazines entering a new golden age?” – enjoy it while it lasts. George Bush was guilty, though, again, maybe better you don’t know what’s coming, 1988.)
