Internet killed the video star

George “gazillion letter” Stroumboulopoulos has become the face of Hockey Night in Canada, Rick the Temp Campanelli and his haircut co-hosts Entertainment Tonight Canada, Erica Ehm runs a real talk mommy blog and the Much Music Video Awards now also air on CTV and MTV.

We’re not going to say something melodramatic like MuchMusic, as we know it, is dead. No, certainly not.

Especially not after Justin Stockman, vice president of entertainment specialty channels (including Much) at Bell Media told the National Post in the lead up to last week’s MMVAs that “Much’s mission statement hasn’t really changed.”

“I think we’re tweaking it but we’re still focused on the same things we always were: youth, pop culture and being relevant to a young audience,” he said adding that the show still plays the same number of music videos as it used to, albeit outside of regular viewing hours.

But are being alive and full of life not two different things?

Just ask the kids who grew up swooning over Erica Ehm, who stood outside of MuchMusic HQ “just in case some celebs popped by”, who welcomed the colourful array of gonzo-esque personalities, the VJs, into their homes, each with their own take on the tunes.

To them it was a Canadian institution.

Sure, sure. Times change, technology evolves, hairlines recede. We get it. But what of the identity Much Music spent three decades hammering into the minds of the revolving audience of pimply-faced, wide-eyed, adoring teens?

“It’s different, it’s not dead, audiences changes, the music industry changes, the consumer changes, nothing’s going to sit still,” Alan Cross music historian and host of the syndicated radio series The Ongoing History of New Music told Yahoo Canada. “We can be nostalgic about this notion of sitting around watching music videos on the television when we get home from school or when we have nothing to do but fire up a spliff and eat potato chips – but it’s never going to come back, the Internet killed the video star.”

But Much Music’s identity wasn’t in the videos it played; it was in the relatable VJs that spoke to the teens glued to their TV sets while the camera dude (or dudette, who’s to say) wobbled their kitschy shaky-cam around the control room.

“There was a period of time where the industry seemed to be interested in getting rid of all of the curators, all the people that were there to personify the music and the lifestyle and to put it into context,” says Cross.

The solution? Roll the videos or in the case of radio, give the people the jams non-stop, and be done with it.

“But along came the iPod and playlists and people realized maybe one of the differentiators that we have is real people to connect all the dots,” says Cross. “We’re seeing some return to the human curator – someone is actually going to tell you why a song matters, why an artist matters and why you should care.”

Stockman and the rest of the crew at Bell aren’t delusional, they know the identity is rooted in the curator-viewer relationship but the way they deliver the goods is much more suited to the YouTube Generation, says
Dr. Scott Henderson – chair of the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University and executive director of the Popular Culture Association of Canada.

Last year, Bell canned the majority of Much Music’s staff, ditched on-air video jockeys in favour of Much Creators – social media influencers and YouTube personalities – and replaced original, live programming with American, young-adult focused programming.

Not that Bell is to blame, they’re just moving with the times.

“I don’t think in five or six years networks will exist in the way that they do,” says Henderson. “We’ve accelerated so quickly that there is this sort of flattening of global youth culture to a large degree where we can all access the same stuff, conveniently – finding ways to put a Canadian inflection on there is becoming a bit trickier.”

As for how the dilution of a Canadian institution will ripple through the culture of CanCon, Henderson suspects it’ll be met with the same ambivalent stares of the scores of Canadians using VPNs to tap into American Netflix.

“We’ve lost that sense that broadcasting and mass culture had national boundaries and they don’t seem to anymore,” says Henderson.

But maybe it wasn’t Much or Bell that diluted the brand’s identity after all. Maybe it was us, the viewers who wanted more and more control.

“As much as it’s not for me, I think Much recognizes that content is what it’s about and it’s no longer about that channel identity,” adds Henderson. “These (Much) creators are working within Canada and they’re inflecting the way in which global culture is reaching them and they’re talking about it and reaching back out – maybe that’s the future.”