MUSIC CHANNELS

 A music channel is a television channel that is purely dedicated to music. There are various types of music channels, playing different types of music. For example ‘Kerrang’ music channel is purely dedicated to rock music, therefore will only play videos that are by rock artists. Where as ‘Smash Hits’ is more mainstream, pop music.
Music channels do not only play music videos however, they might often have interviews with music artist, allowing fans to find out more about their favourite bands and artists. Music channels will often have programme schedules such as “Top 50 biggest tracks of the year” and so on. Some channels such as Kiss might also have things such as “Drake vs. Will I Am”, which allow audiences to feel as though they are involved in a competition, and will judge the artists for themselves.

MTV which originally stood for Music Television, is an American cable television channel based in New York City that launched on August 1, 1981.
The original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by on-air hosts. Today, MTV primarily broadcasts a variety of reality and scripted television programs targeted at adolescents and young adults.
It also has numerous sister channels in the U.S for example MTV DANCE, MTV ROCKS, MTV CLASSIC and so on.
MTV is probably the largest most influencial music video, as it was the first channel to show the first ever music video – video killed the radio star by the buggles.

VIVA is another more recent music channel. VIVA a free-to-air German language based music television channel went first on the air on 1. December 1993. After many years of fierce competition for audience share, MTV Networks Europe eventually acquired VIVA on 14. January 2005 after it had outran its own efforts for better ratings. MTV today operates VIVA channels across Europe, in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. However, unlike normal music channels, viva also plays TV shows, such as Fresh Prince of Bel Aire, Spongebob, Family guy and My sweet 16. This gives them an advantage over other channels, as they are getting to the young target audience using channels that are most popular amongst them

There are millions of music channels, some have taken a more modern approach such as the music channel FLAVA, that has a schedule including a programme called Tweetz and Trendz. This is clever, as the music channel is keeping up with the zeitgeist by allowing audiences at home to tweet their channel with whatever song they want to hear, which ever one appears most, will get played. This also forces audiences to interact with the channel, which have proved most popular.