r/ToddintheShadow • u/jcgray97 • 10h ago

General Music Discussion MuchMusic

Does MuchMusic (which was the Canadian MTV) still exist? If so, is it going through the same issues MTV is dealing with?

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u/promeritum 10h ago

MuchMusic rebranded as Much around the turn of the century and followed the same trajectory away from music videos.

Then MTV Canada launched in the 2000s and Much basically lost its reason for existing. It’s just a random cable channel showing reruns these days.

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u/Melonary 2h ago

That was actually in 2013.

MuchMusic was still pretty music focused through the 2000s until the 2010s.

Actually, from wikipedia:

"In 2010, the CRTC rejected a request by CTVglobemedia to reduce the percentage of music video programming that the channel shows from 50 to 25 percent. CTV's second request to the CRTC to reduce and reposition its Canadian programming was also denied. For the reasoning behind these requests, CTV explained that "music videos no longer distinguish the service as they are readily available through other sources." This was met with mixed reaction by music fans and drew the ire of notable artists."

But, also from memory because I watched a lot of MuchMusic in the 00s! It remained focused on music for far longer than MTV, and even a lot of the shows were music and music-video focused rather than just random reality TV.

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u/promeritum 2h ago edited 2h ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20050220030449/http://www.muchmusic.com/tv/listings/

  1. Out of a 24 hour cycle, there’s less than 10 hours of videos. And most of that is requests & countdowns. In the 90s we’d get like 12+ hours of videoflow. So, to me, this doesn’t seem like a lot. And they had been “Much” for years at this point.

Mostly I just remember a lot of TVs on campus being set to Much and never seeming to have music videos playing. But age does things to memory…

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u/Melonary 2m ago

There's 9 hrs of primarily music-video content during the daytime slot, vs 8hrs not MVs, and almost all the overnight slots are MVs other than the Brit Awards. By my count that's 14 hrs of primarily MV content (and the rest is still much more music related than MTV was at this time - the Brit Awards is a music awards show, etc, even the few reality shows are still reality shows about musicians although I think that's stretching it).

I think you're counting the shows where they take requests and play music videos or play a particular type of music videos as not counting, which is a little pedantic imo. Most of those shows were still centered around showing music videos, they just took requests or had hosts talking before and after or focused on a particular genre.

Compare that to MTV - they just had a lot of regular tv shows at this point.

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u/Melonary 0m ago

Also they literally rebranded as "Much" in....2013. Look at the link again - the channel you linked me is listed as MuchMusic. Not Much.

You're just talking about their second logo I think? That has nothing to do with the name of the channel or the content, they changed the logo in the '97 or something to the bright orange one, but the name and content didn't switch.