MTV News has pulled its digital archive, making thousands of news stories, profiles, interviews, and other editorial features dating back to the 1996 no longer accessible on the web.
Paramount Global, MTV’s parent company, shut down MTV News in May 2023 as part of a larger overall company layoff, according to Variety. A little over a year later, the site’s archive was unceremoniously taken offline with no advanced warning.
As I noted on Twitter (and speaking from personal experience), I believe the decision was at least partially motivated by Paramount’s unwillingness to pay for E&O (errors and omissions) insurance and associated licensing costs (such as for Getty Images) in perpetuity. Every piece of content published on a site like MTV comes with a certain amount of risk. Is there a sentence that is inaccurate? Does a negative review contain something that an artist might construe as libelous? Is a photo or video properly licensed? And often times, these issues don’t surface until years after the initial piece of content was published. For a site as expansive as MTV News, such costs were likely astronomical, and even with insurance and licensing deals, those aren’t failsafes against a costly lawsuit. If there was no revenue being generated, you can see why Paramount would want MTV News off its balance sheet.
On the other hand, for a brand with the legacy of MTV / MTV News, there really is no excuse for why it shouldn’t have been generating revenue in the first place — whether by monetizing its archive — or through the continued production of new content in a smart and thoughtful way.
Instead, writers who poured hundreds of thousands of cumulative hours writing for MTV News over the last 30 years now to rely on the Wayback Machine to save any clips for their own personal archive, and important relic of music history has been lost to the ether.
