---
title: "Don’t Watch That, Watch This: Cultural Legacy Inspires Rockbot Music Videos"
description: Learn about the cultural impact of MTV, the evolution of music discovery, and how Rockbot Music Videos contribute to modern brick and mortar businesses.
image: https://blog.rockbot.com/hubfs/Blog-Header_Music-Videos.jpg
---
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# Don’t Watch That, Watch This: Cultural Legacy Inspires Rockbot Music Videos
Last updated | October 1, 2026
 Tyler Lenane, VP of Content & Programming
[Tyler Lenane, VP of Content & Programming](https://blog.rockbot.com/author/tyler-lenane-vp-of-content-programming)
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Table of Contents ▾
### Table of Contents
The first music video I saw was Madness, [“One Step Beyond.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhBs1RXpD9I) I remember guys in black suits with shaved heads and sunglasses doing the “nutty train” strut in a line to frantic ska upbeats and an eerie, infectious sax melody. The song opens with Chas Smash hollering, “Hey you! Don’t watch that, watch this!” I was eight years old. I had no idea what I was looking at or listening to, but I knew immediately it was better than everything else on television, and I wanted more.
This was actually pre-MTV. I was watching videos on Nickelodeon, which at the time wasn’t a kids’ channel. In the early 80s, Nickelodeon ran a video-jukebox show called [PopClips](https://nypost.com/2017/04/22/how-a-fake-rocker-helped-create-mtv/), created by Michael Nesmith of The Monkees. The executive who put it on the air, John Lack, saw it work and pitched the music-video idea to MTV, where it launched about a year later.
Like many of my peers, I couldn’t get enough of MTV. Those early music videos shaped me, not only as a music fan, but as someone who has since spent his entire life in the industry – as a teenager playing in punk rock bands touring the country, as a music attorney representing Joey Ramone, as a founder and CEO of Gimme Radio, and as a digital music executive who spent years at companies like Apple, Beats, Napster, and now Rockbot.
## How Music Videos Changed TV
Music videos were around even before Nickelodeon played that Madness video and well before[the official launch of MTV on August 1, 1981](https://www.britannica.com/money/MTV), with the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” The Beatles were making promotional films for “Paperback Writer,” the Monkees were actually made for TV, and Elvis gave us *Viva Las Vegas* (among dozens of other movies).
What MTV made new was the act of watching music videos as a shared cultural ritual: a deliberately programmed stream that gave people across the country the same artists, images, and sounds to react to at roughly the same time. Fans could discover new music, and record labels could market artists through a national audiovisual channel.
MTV was an innovative curator, especially in the early days; I remember Adam Ant playing after the Stray Cats, Pat Benatar, and April Wine. Later came specialty shows like [“Yo! MTV Raps”](https://www.vulture.com/article/yo-mtv-raps-oral-history.html), which put hip-hop culture in front of a global audience and changed the genre’s commercial trajectory permanently. [“120 Minutes”](https://www.openculture.com/2016/02/120-minutes-archive.html) was like college radio for kids who lived nowhere near a college radio station, and it was where many people first heard R.E.M., The Replacements, and Black Flag.
As John Lack described the MTV phenomenon to [Vanity Fair](https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2000/11/birth-of-an-mtv-nation), "It was television that didn't look like television." And the appeal was undeniable: [MTV’s popularity exploded](https://time.com/archive/6709643/video-mtv-faces-a-mid-life-crisis/), from appearing in 2.5 million cable homes at launch, to 35.8 million by 1987. MTV programmers chose the cadence of videos and which videos appeared together, as well as which scenes received dedicated programming – this helped turn music discovery into a communal experience.
As one retrospective put it, “Overnight, kids around the country became aware of acts and styles that [they’d never heard of before](https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2018/08/good-day-yo-mtv-raps-turns-30/).”
Ad for MTV showing an astronaut on the moon next to a flag with the MTV logo, 1981-1983, c/o [National Air and Space Museum](https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/image/nmah-ac0453-0000028jpeg)
## Cultural Impacts: From MTV to On-Demand Discovery
MTV changed artists’ careers by making videos a significant part of music promotion. Musicians could reach a national audience through regular video rotation, and audiences began to connect an artist’s sound with their style, performance, fashion, and attitude.
Video helped turn artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson into cultural icons. Madonna used it to go from a fixture of New York’s downtown art and club scene, running with Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat and hanging out at Danceteria, to the walls, bedrooms, and malls of teenage America. Michael Jackson used MTV to turn choreographed modern dance into a new pop art form; instead of kids playing air guitar in bedrooms, they moonwalked and danced along to zombies from the video for “Thriller.” MTV gave both artists a platform to show audiences who they were, again and again, for decades.
Of course, MTV’s role as a primary music-discovery channel didn’t last forever. By the 1990s, the network was investing more and more in non-music programming, and music videos gradually faded from its schedule – [MTV's music-video airtime dropped 36.5%](https://books.google.com/books?id=KBQEAAAAMBAJ&pg=RA1-PA68#v=onepage&q&f=false) from 1995 to 2000. The change reflected a broader shift in how people consumed media. Audiences no longer had to wait for a scheduled rotation or rely on a cable channel to encounter a new artist. Instead, they could search for a video, follow a creator, or receive recommendations through on-demand platforms.
YouTube eventually became the largest platform for official music videos, giving artists a permanent, searchable global archive for releases and performances. Today, music videos represent roughly [33% of all YouTube viewing time](https://omdia.tech.informa.com/pr/2026/jan/youtube-reaches-29-billion-videos-as-music-and-shorts-dominate-viewing). TikTok, streaming services, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts have introduced a different kind of discovery: short-form, socially driven, and algorithmically distributed videos that introduce viewers to today’s top artists.
Among younger audiences, TikTok is now a leading music-discovery method – 84% of songs entering the Billboard Global 200 in 2024 had a period of [high engagement on TikTok first](https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/tiktok-and-luminate-release-latest-music-impact-report), and over a one-year period (beginning in April 2025), TikTok's [Add to Music App](https://newsroom.tiktok.com/6-billion-tracks-saved-w-tt-add-to-music-app?lang=en) reported over 6 billion track saves.
Not surprisingly, these music discovery trends parallel shifts in how people think about TV more broadly. In fact, Deloitte found that [41% of consumers](https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/industry/technology/changing-tv-watching-mindset.html) count social video and streaming as "watching TV." TV today can be described as “anything on a screen that feels relevant, authentic, and worth an audience's time."
## By the Numbers: Why Music Videos Work and Why They Still Matter for Artists
Research supports what most of us already notice when watching music videos. Namely, that how an artist directs their gaze, holds their body, moves (their form and face), and how intense they are physically can [impact our feelings](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11721651/) – with more expressive gestures likely to have a stronger emotional impact.
A [study on short music videos](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9644217/) also found that video type and musical rhythm both influence viewers’ emotional response – for example, when a track is paired with narrative, live performance, or humor, the effect is different. Context matters, too: [film research](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39102395/) has shown that viewers interpret the same neutral facial expression as happier or scarier depending on what scene came before. In music videos, the same is true: editing, imagery, performance type, and story can impact how viewers make sense of a recording (and how they feel while watching it).
These emotional outcomes can have direct monetary impacts for artists, as two YouTube events highlight:
- [Evidence from Germany’s YouTube blackout](https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/video-killed-radio-star-online-music-videos-and-recorded-music-sales) shows that when videos became unavailable, sales of the affected songs fell by roughly 5% to 10% – and the effect was especially strong for younger, lesser-known artists. When Vevo entered the German market, sales of the corresponding songs rose by about 10%, according to the same research.
- [A separate study](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167718722000492) of Warner Music’s YouTube blackout found that affected artists earned, on average, 18 percentage points less annual concert revenue and saw ticket-price outcomes fall by 11.8 percentage points relative to comparable artists.
For artists, then, video remains a way to turn a release into a fuller creative work with emotional power: a performance audiences can return to, a visual identity fans can recognize, and a story that can travel with the song. That scale is more substantial than ever. Rockbot’s partner Vevo reports distributing more than [1 million music videos](https://www.hq.vevo.com/) across its network each month, reaching 22 billion views and 1.5 billion viewing hours.
## Meeting the Moment with Rockbot Music Videos
Rockbot now offers [six ad-free music video channels](https://rockbot.com/music-videos) through an [exclusive partnership with Vevo](https://blog.rockbot.com/pr/vevo-rockbot-music-video-partnership?hsLang=en), the world's largest music video provider. Three are dayparted (day, night, and late night) because a business’s customer journey changes across the day, and the programming should change with it. There are three genre channels: dance, rock, and hip-hop – and we look forward to adding other genres in the future.
We launched our music video offering and chose Vevo as our partner because we think this content matters for the businesses running our screens and for the artists whose work appears on them. As Natalie Gabathuler-Scully, Vevo’s EVP of Revenue, Distribution & Data Operations, put it: “Music videos have always been one of the most powerful intersections of music, culture and visual storytelling, making them uniquely suited for out-of-home environments where people gather and share experiences.”
These experiences are even more valuable when you consider that [over 80% of sales](https://capitaloneshopping.com/research/online-vs-in-store-shopping-statistics) still happen in brick-and-mortar locations. For many brands with physical locations, always-on media programming serves as a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Others, however, want a more customized and curated experience that involves strategically choosing what plays – or entrusting experts to choose – in order to create special moments for guests and reinforce brand identity.
Forty-some years ago, a group of musicians I’d never heard of walked across my TV screen in matching suits and told me: “Don’t watch that, watch this.” I didn’t choose that song from a search box, and an algorithm didn’t decide I'd like it; someone deliberately put a music video in front of me because they thought it was worth seeing. They made a curated choice. And that moment changed the way I thought about music, and in some ways, the course of my life.
That is what great curation can do. It doesn’t just give people more of what they already know. It sets something unexpected in their path and creates a meaningful opportunity for connection. The payoff of great curation shows up in how people feel in a venue. Your business space may very well become part of someone’s memory around an artist or video, the place they first saw something they’ll never forget.
Let’s bring people together in your locations to celebrate the legacy and future of music videos. [Reach out](https://rockbot.com/contact-sales) to learn more.
Tyler Lenane, VP of Content & Programming
Author
Tyler brings 25+ years of experience across digital music and streaming, including senior roles at Beats Music, Apple, and Napster. Most recently, he co-founded and served as CEO of Gimme Radio. Tyler got his start playing guitar in punk bands before spending over a decade in New York working at record labels and representing artists like the Ramones as an attorney. Today, he leads Rockbot content strategy and partnerships across music and video for retail, hospitality, healthcare, and entertainment environments.
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