Video may have killed the radio star when MTV debuted in 1981, but now, two decades and 47 Madonna videos later, MTV is killing the video star.

A fearless eminence in the Gen X movement, MTV has mysteriously evolved from a video channel with a few shows to a show channel with a few videos.

In May of last year, newly appointed MTV general manager Van Toffler jubilantly announced the station would put the M back in MTV and ax several of the channel’s lifestyle shows, replacing them with music-related programming.

But the announcement wasn’t without a swift kick in the music industry’s ass. MTV would tighten its playlist … again.

On a mission to give more focus to viewers, the channel that made names out of the Bangles and Beck would diminish from about 60 videos in regular rotation to 50.

“In any given week, we may have about 67 different videos in some level of rotation, but a lot of those might get played once or twice,” Toffler told Billboard magazine. “It’s hard to make an impact with that kind of programming. We want to tighten the playlist so that of the videos we do play, we play them more often, so that we’re shouting louder about the artists to our audience.”

I want my M2

While MTV is shouting Puff Daddy and Rammstein, music video fans are shouting an unexpected name — M2.

MTV’s two-year-old offspring, M2, is a non-commercial, 24-hour-a-day video network. And as the numbers prove, the channel has become the primary playground for the thousands of videos that are made each year.

A Billboard survey for the week of Dec. 22 to 28, 1997, showed that while MTV aired 245 videos during the week, M2 aired 430. (CMT came out on top with 461, while VH1 aired 230, BET aired 193 and TNN aired 50. MuchMusic, a Canada-based network modeled closely after MTV, showed only 95.)

“Basically, M2 is a channel that gets MTV back to its roots, where it’s all music video,” says Debora Blume, communications director for TCI of Iowa. “I understand from talking to customers and so forth, that they really liked MTV when it was music videos and started to lose people when it got into all the other kinds of programming.”

M2 is unlike MTV in that it is not easily available. M2 is offered to all cable companies, but because the station is relatively new, few systems have added it.

While MTV boasts 67 million subscribers, M2 is still under 10 million.

“A lot of people I know have been anxiously waiting for M2 to finally be on cable,” Reprise vice president of video promotion Wendy Griffiths told Billboard. “I’ve heard many people say M2 is what MTV should be — a network that shows nothing but music.”

Neither analog nor digital cable offers the channel in any Iowa markets. In Ames, a limited channel capacity keeps even VH1 from being available to residents.

“A system has to be rebuilt in order to gain increased band width, and that requires a lot of work,” Blume says. “I know the Ames system is set to be rebuilt at some point.”

Even when the Ames channel capacity is expanded, the chance that M2 or other music video networks will be added is still slim.

“It comes down to customer demand,” Blume says. “A lot of Iowa markets now survey customers when there is open channel space to see what they want. There’s a product on the digital product right now called MuchMusic, but I don’t believe that’s been received well by customers so that channel is being replaced in April. There needs to be demand for the product.”

M2 has budged its way into cable access in some markets. In December of 1997, M2 inked a deal with MediaOne in Jacksonville, Fla., to land its first cable distribution deal.

“M2 has certainly exceeded our expectations, considering how hard it is for a new network to get on a cable system,” M2 general manager Matt Farber told Billboard at the time.

Other M2 perks include local programming (through three affiliate breaks per hour), concert updates and information on the local music scene. M2 also features interactive capabilities via computers equipped with Intel’s Intercast technology.

Suite alternatives

MTV’s straying from video music programming has not only made life easier for its neighbors at VH1 but has also spawned other networks and video outlets along with M2.

VH1 has caught the tails of an American audience that grew up on MTV in the ’80s and nurtured them with adult contemporary tunes and addictive shows like “Pop Up Video” and “Behind The Music.”

Along with an increase in ratings, VH1 has been added to most cable systems in the country, including Iowa’s, where for the past several years, it was primarily an afternoon network.

“Many markets in Iowa have VH1,” Blume says. “It has an audience, but it definitely is not up in the level of the USA and Nickelodeon. It tends to have an older audience, I would guess the 25-to-40 age-group.”

Hitting MTV’s audience of 13- to 25-year-olds are a swarm of video sites on the Internet, including www.musicvideos.com, www.rollingstone.com, www.vidnetusa.com and www.internetv.com.

Record labels are also launching their own music video channels on the Web, including Sony’s forthcoming Video Music Network (www.videomusicnetwork.com) and Atlantic Records’ INSTAVID (www.instavid.com).

MTV, along with VH1, is combating Web sites and competing new networks like MuchMusic and The Box with a digital spin-off channel package called The Suite.

Launched last August, The Suite consists of M2, MTV X (hard-rock), MTV S (spanish), VH1 Soul (R & B), VH1 Country and VH1 Smooth (jazz/adult contemporary/new age).

“Right now, the Suite is in about a few hundred-thousand households and mostly in small markets,” Farber told Billboard in November. “1999 is the year in which member system operators will be rolling out digital upgrades in major markets, and we expect to see a dramatic increase in distribution [for the Suite].”

MTV has also announced it is revamping its Web site to include videos and is looking into other video outlet options.

However, in January, the station discontinued plans to launch MTV Indie, which was to focus on independent-label music.

“We found that M2 plays a lot of independent music already, so MTV Indie would be a duplication of our efforts,” Farber said.

The Box, a video network in which viewers can call in and purchase requests, also launched digital spin-off channels, collectively called the Box Set, late last year.

The Box Set includes Box Pulse (Top 40), Box Urban (R & B), Box Edge (alternative/modern rock), Box Classic (older pop) and the newer Latin music channels Box Exitos and Box Tejano.

“The difference between our spin-off and spin-offs from our competition,” Box president Alan McGlade told Billboard, “is that we don’t require cable and satellite operators to take all the channels as part of the package. We target these channels to a specific market.”

Less taste, more fillers

Although it didn’t take long for industry insiders to recognize the video outlet shortage caused by MTV’s incredible shrinking playlist, it still may be too late to save the music video genre.

A September SPIN article reported that record company executives were under the impression that they shouldn’t make a video unless a song was already a surefire radio hit.

And since the cost of making videos isn’t getting any cheaper, record labels are balking more and more at the curve ball known as video production.

In a November Billboard article, Columbia Records vice president of video production Joanne Gardner said, “We’re busier now than ever before. That doesn’t necessarily mean we’re making more videos, but the stakes are higher in music video-making for production quality and getting the videos on MTV. MTV is still considered the main outlet where people want their videos seen, and MTV has less programming slots available to show videos than they did in the early days.”

Danielle Cagaanan, executive producer of Satellite Music Video, a Los Angeles production company representing directors such as Spike Jonze (Beastie Boys, Sean Lennon) and Mark Kohr (Green Day, Everclear), told SPIN, “We do half as many videos as we used to do [two years ago].”

Record companies have also noticed that MTV is leaning heavily on the staples of contemporary Top 40 programming like teen pop, R & B and hip-hop.

Rock music, which was once the voice of MTV, has been pushed aside to overnight hours.

Instead, prime time is used to further push The Sure Things.

At this pace, Madonna should reach 100 videos by 2010 and The Buggles — the first video played on MTV — will still be at one.