THE DEATH OF VJS ; It’s Coming

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The general practice of playing music videos on television, termed as vjing, might just be coming to an end.

As the rise of independant network enterprises such as HBO and YouTube, commercial television is slowly dying out, I mean why watch day to day curation when you can just curate it yourself.

Television networks such as MTV, we're one of the first to introduce the concept of music videos to the world. One of the first videos to air was Video Killed The Radio Star by The Buggies, the irony in this is uncanny. Being a VJ at the time meant you had to get the latest musical video content, you and your network would then be paid from the views of the network, the artist would be paid out on royalties, etc.

Artists had no choice to make sure that they videos looked appealing and had replay value, this form of media created a new side for the artistic expression to exist in, some other artist career's at the time came to an end due to how terrible their videos looked. As time went on, the airing of music videos would eventually become bias, the hype train would eventually catch on to the artists and the music video industry. Labels were now using this form of media as a tool for advertising and promoting,so they would now have VJs to curate certain songs to the masses in return for a big fat cheque. The networks didn't care too much of what the VJs were playing since there was already an established audience and viewership. VJs went on to make alot of money just being presenters and TV hosts.

Time will tell how far this practice will go, since artists now require incentivesto have their media distributed across platforms, playing someone's media is going to require some form of ownership or agreement, which is how its always been butseeing that we're talking about independent artists and also the death of labels being on the rise too, maybe this how the whole nft game will come into play. People now have the powerto own their content, the only way to messthis up isto get the artist to believe that they are being paid by exposure, which I'm sure they will do.

This is definitely getting more and more redundant, artists want their money's worth of whateverstuff they make, considering how much effort goesin to shooting a proper music video. The meaning mass media is quickly changing itself, we're breaking down our former structure that consisted of huge conglomerates controlling everything, into independent enterprises and communities that are capable of providing better content.

After reading through this piece, you start to catch the irony I mentioned earlier, of the first song to be aired on MTV. At this point of view it lookslike the art of vjing didn't age so well, considering that people still appreciate djsto this day. What happensto the vj now?

Well, I'm guessing this is it, this is where it dies out.

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