Did Video kill the Radio Star?

Have music videos a tendency to kill/suppress specific musical substance/qualities?

"Video Killed the Radio Star ...

They took the credit for your second symphony
Rewritten by machine and new technology
And now I understand the problems you can see”

(read further down below, if you are interested in details about the quoted hit-singles history)

Like the songwriter Trevor Horn (b. 1949) I was lucky enough to be born (1951) before music in general as a rule became dominated and promoted by visual effects. Even though musical performance always had a quite obvious optical quality – would it be a Celtic bard, a chivalrous minstrel or an opera performance – especially classical music was - already before record players and radios became the most important “music carriers” of their time - very much dominated by the acoustic quality. That fact had its offspring in church music, corals and since than polyphonic choirs, organ music and musical masses transferred to the worldly music halls for performances of classical music as we know it: for a bourgeois audience expecting the ultimate sound quality.

This had since the transistorization of amplification been transferred to private homes, where already at a time when color TVs were just at their brink, it was possible to reproduce music in a very high acoustic quality while only real music-movies shown in cinemas could (if they were equipped to it) show music in a quality worth watching and listening to at the same time. For the most the movies showing music were, where the money was:

a Musicals

b Childish movies with pop/rock-stars in leading roles performing in pre-bollywood stile productions of mostly American but sometime also European origin.

While TV-sets through the seventies, eighties and nineties of the 20th century enhanced their color quality and since with the flat-screens everywhere also the number of pixels, the musical/acoustic quality of this equipment stagnated completely (commonly) while the connoisseur stereo sets were sold to aficionados and very well to to people.

Off course would home cinemas since than be equipped with at least good sound bars and since earthquake speakers. But the youngsters without rooms and leisureliness to be placed in one place in the basement only, ran off with their smartphones where there was already a legion of videos waiting to be spread by YouTube and others – all the time supplemented by new videos more exiting to watch and seldom really worth listening to without the video.

However (as I have been told by a younger “listener”) there is a wave of music streaming services such as Spotify, Apple and Tidal, where there is a new focus on audio quality enabeling HiFi and master quality (16/24 bit) for an extra fee.

https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000397069-TIDAL-MASTERS

So … the visual dominance in the electronic presentation of music should not bother me too much, if I could look at it pragmatically and admit, that pop- or rock music in its essence is about pleasing and earning lots of money by doing so.

But besides that there is the enormous heritage of the “utmost” quality of acoustic experience, not dominated by visual impression.

This heritage might fade away without an effort … and there are after all quite many people out there, who think it could be worth trying to interest musically interested youngsters for the joy of experiencing music as music per se and not only a sub-medium to computer-games, movies or “music-videos”

Cafe Classique is trying to contribute a tiny little bit to that -

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"Video Killed the Radio Star"

is a song written by Trevor Horn, Geoff Downes and Bruce Woolley in 1978. It was first recorded by Bruce Woolley and The Camera Club (with Thomas Dolby on keyboards) for their album English Garden, and later by British group the Buggles, consisting of Horn and Downes. The track was recorded and mixed in 1979, released as their debut single on 7 September 1979 by Island Records, and included on their first album The Age of Plastic. The backing track was recorded at Virgin's Town House in West London, and mixing and vocal recording would later take place at Sarm East Studios.

"Video Killed the Radio Star"s theme was promotion of technology while worrying about its effects. This song relates to concerns about mixed attitudes towards 20th-century inventions and machines for the media arts. Musically, the song performs like an extended jingle.

Commercially, "Video Killed the Radio Star" was also a success. The track topped sixteen international music charts, including the official singles charts of the group's home country of the UK and other nations such as Australia, Austria, France, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, as well as the Japanese Oricon International Chart. It also peaked within the top 10 in Canada, Germany, New Zealand and South Africa, the top 20 in Belgium and the Netherlands, and barely in the top 40 in the United States.

Quite ironically the song's music video, written, directed, and edited by Russell Mulcahy, is well-remembered as the first music video shown on MTV in the United States at 12:01a.m. on 1 August 1981, and the first video shown on MTV Classic in the United Kingdom on 1 March 2010.

From Wikipedia

Video Killed The Radio Star - lyrics

Trevor Horn/Buggles The Age Of Plastic

I heard you on the wireless back in '52
Lying awake intent on tuning in on you
If I was young it didn't stop you coming through
Oh-a oh

They took the credit for your second symphony
Rewritten by machine and new technology
And now I understand the problems you can see
Oh-a oh
I met your children
Oh-a oh
What did you tell them?

Video killed the radio star
Video killed the radio star
Pictures came and broke your heart
Oh-a-a-a oh

And now we meet in an abandoned studio
We hear the playback and it seems so long ago
And you remember the jingles used to go
Oh-a oh
You were the first one
Oh-a oh
You were the last one

Video killed the radio star
Video killed the radio star
In my mind and in my car
We can't rewind we've gone to far
Oh-a-a-a oh
Oh-a-a-a oh

Video killed the radio star
Video killed the radio star
In my mind and in my car
We can't rewind we've gone to far
Pictures came and broke your heart
Put the blame on VCR

You are a radio star
You are a radio star
Video killed the radio star
Video killed the radio star
….