
MTV VHS Recordings 1981 to 1989 [video] - shervinafshar
https://archive.org/details/mtv-80s-vhs-full-recording-collection/
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myrandomcomment
I am old enough to have watched the first few hours. The cable came into a box
on the TV. I think it was a 25 inch tube as my Dad liked to watch the NFL
games. The cable box was a dial with ~60 channels on it and a A/B switch (so
there was channel 60A and channel 60B). The TV had a remote but of course that
did not work with the cable box so my job as the kid was to change the channel
when my parents asked!

There was not a ton of videos so they replayed them a ton. I remember seeing
The Buggles, Go-go’s, Toto, Prince, etc. A lot of the videos where just the
band on stage playing with various camera views. I also remember watching the
premiere of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983) with my parents. It was pretty
cool.

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quaffapint
I remember there were no 'alternative' radio stations around me at the time,
so I looked forward to every Sunday night to watch and listen to MTV's 120
minutes to hear all the new stuff (or new to me anyway). Thanks for sharing
these.

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myrandomcomment
Dave Kendall (one of the host of 120 Minutes) does a show every Friday on XM
First Wave on Friday nights - Party 360 with Dave Kendall. There is also Dark
Wave on Sundays. Between those 2 it covers anything you would have heard on
120 Minutes.

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cbm-vic-20
Our modern era of algorithmic music programming (or the "four hour playlist"
format) makes be pine for the days when actual humans did music programming.
SiriusXM has a lot of stations with really good on-air talent. Not sure how
much leeway they have on what actually gets played, but they're at least
knowledgeable. Some college radio stations are also really good. (Shout-out to
John Richards at KEXP!)

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mattigames
This collection has 8 videos from 1990 and 3 from 1991. There is a few others
from MTV's 90s on other collections at archive.arg:
[https://archive.org/details/movies?sin=&and%5B%5D=MTV&and%5B...](https://archive.org/details/movies?sin=&and%5B%5D=MTV&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221999%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221998%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221997%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221996%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221995%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221994%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221993%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221992%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221991%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221990%22&sort=-downloads)

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PhantomGremlin
Does anyone know where to _buy_ good quality music videos from the 1980s?

Currently some are available on YouTube, some on iTunes, some nowhere. Quality
is very hit-and-miss.

Why doesn't Apple have all of these for sale? Is it an issue of rights? Do
they think there wouldn't be enough demand? Is there is a lot already
available in torrents and that would compete with iTunes?

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unixhero
Why do you want to purchase a music video??? Do you run a TV station and will
re-broadcast it, or some other broadcasting strategy?

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DyslexicAtheist
why would it be for rebroadcast purposes? not OP but I want to have such
things streamed to my TV in my own home.

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unixhero
Because music videos are free.

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DyslexicAtheist
I would pay money for original media because the data will likely be in it's
"best" original encoding, metadata etc. And nobody other than the studio has
meddled with it. You don't get that using youtube-dl or torrenting formats
other people provide.

edit: Music production evolves over time and digital content distribution is
very different in the mixing business. Older formats are not built with
streaming in mind and so you lose a lot of quality during upload to streaming
services:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHxMsawJsTc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHxMsawJsTc)

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PhantomGremlin
Thank you for explaining. Many videos on YouTube are low quality.

Also, if I buy it I expect that some decent percentage of my purchase price
makes it back to the original artist. (I know, very naïve of me). If I get it
off youtube then the artist might get just a fraction of a cent in the best
case.

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TMWNN
I've heard that MTV caused new fashions to become popular outside big cities
first, because rural areas were more likely to have cable TV in the 1980s.

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redis_mlc
Well, urban centers had a choice of over-the-air (OTA) TV and FM broadcast
signals. So suburban areas may have adopted cable faster because they had less
choices.

For those too young to have experienced OTA, the TV signal was crisper (no
bleed) than cable. FM is actually CD-quality if you're in a major city and
have a $1000 receiver.

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2OEH8eoCRo0
I prefer the commercials are left in.

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_cairn
Getting:

This video file cannot be played. (Error Code: 224003)

On all the videos, tried Safari and Chrome.

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DyslexicAtheist
archive encodes these files upon upload. you can click the torrent link and
download the files it's only ~9GB. consider seeding it for a day or 2 so
others can access it quickly too.

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gentryb
Any idea if the torrent might get updated to more than 5 of the files
contained? I was quite disappointed after grabbing it.

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Dig1t
All of the links on the site are now broken with the message "The item is not
available due to issues with the item's content."

Was the content taken down because of copyright issues?

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Sophistifunk
Not a single video of Adam Curry's magnificent 80s hairdo? It's a bleedin'
outrage!

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Animats
How can the uploader claim public domain for that?

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AlecSchueler
Archive is classified as a library in the United States, as far as I
understand it.

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Animats
They put a public domain tag on the content, which is different than the
library exception.

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afpx
Can you access these through torrents?

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shervinafshar
Yes. In the "Download Options" sidebar there is a link to the torrent
manifesto file.

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beerandt
Every torrent I've gotten off archive.org has just been links to the http seed
file and no trackers.

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unixhero
Really really good proramming.

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8iterations
Totally Rad!

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paypalcust83
Back when music videos were awesome works of cinematography, production,
visual, and musical art:

Dire Straits - Money For Nothing (complete with CG and 80's pastel graphics on
live video) - [https://youtu.be/csje_Tb0U0c](https://youtu.be/csje_Tb0U0c)

Here's a playlist of 80's MTV videos, starting with the Space Shuttle and
Apollo launches followed by landing the MTV flag on the moon:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBhuf1g-rY&list=PLDHCLXs2vT...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBhuf1g-rY&list=PLDHCLXs2vTkLK-Y7lCVSM5aC3wBYzAcyw)

Like most things on Internet Archive, individual videos are not annotated very
well so you have no idea what's in the content. Digging through it would be,
sadly, mostly a waste of time. It would be more useful with annotations.

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riffraff
this is interesting, don't you think music videos were good also after the
'80s?

In my very modest opinion they peaked somewhere in the '90s: basically
everything by Michel Gondry until "Let Forever Be"[0] is awesome and some
artists (Prodigy, Bjork, Fatboy Slim, Korn, Marylin Manson) have made their
clips almost as recognizable as their music.

It seems these days they have become fairly boring but then again, maybe I've
just become older and uncool.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FyfQDO5g0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FyfQDO5g0)

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nineteen999
I think you're right, but there's always the element that the older crowd
gravitate towards what we grew up with. And everyone eventually becomes the
older crowd.

There would be some people on here for which even this stuff is too "young";
those who grew up with 50's, 60's and 70's music of course.

