CMT & MTV’s Eradication of Editorial Content is a Catastrophe

Decades of articles, news stories, reviews, interviews, and think pieces have been eliminated from the CMT website, as well as the website of its sister music publication, MTV. It’s not just that the company has laid off all its journalists and editors. It’s that the work of scores of writers over many years—tens of thousands of articles in total—are now gone, and at this point they are unlikely to be reconstituted among budget cuts at CMT’s parent company Paramount.
Sure, some of CMT’s written content over the years has been mellifluous puff pieces on pop country stars that is either expendable or redundant to other articles on a dozen or so other country music/entertainment websites. But this archive also included very important journalism and commentary that cannot be replaced, while CMT was one of the largest and prolific media outlets in country music since its inception in 1983.
For example, award-winning journalist Chet Flippo—who among other achievements wrote the liner notes to the album Wanted: The Outlaws and was the country reporter for Rolling Stone in the ’70s—operated a weekly column called “Nashville Skyline.” All of those columns are now gone. Chet Flippo passed away in 2013, and unless someone has them saved somewhere, they will never again see the light of day.
The CMT archive also including things like CMT’s list of the “Greatest Country Albums of All Time” that has been referenced by Saving Country Music on numerous occasions. It included articles critical to the careers of numerous country performers. Eliminating the articles also results in many thousands of dead links across the internet in country music stories.
For a while, CMT also operated a subdomain called CMT Edge that covered a lot of independent country and Americana artists before it was eliminated in the many rounds of budget cuts at the outlet over the years. Paramount shuttered MTV News in 2023 to the disappointment of many, and CMT’s editorial content has been spotty at best over the last few years. But eliminating all the articles in the past seems especially punitive shortsighted.
Along with being a useful resource to the public, the industry, and other journalists, article archives are often a strong source of revenue for many outlets. Even if the revenue is marginal—especially after Google tweaked its search parameters to emphasize newer articles as opposed to older ones—the ad revenue generated from these articles could easily cover the cost to host them on a server.
But as we have seen in music journalism recently including with Pitchfork, investment capital comes in and purchases outlets, and then guts staff or outright shuts them down believing there is more money to be made in downsizing or eliminating the properties.
The eradication of the CMT archive also calls into question the viability of CMT moving forward. CMT has already moved their annual awards show to CBS since so few young people now have access to the actual cable channel due to cord cutting. The outlet still hosts occasional “Crossroads” episodes and other original programming, but mostly relies on reruns, while most consumers watch music videos on YouTube.
Media continues to be in crisis as it tries to navigate the onslaught of AI, which among other concerns, is cataloging the archives of sites like CMT and Saving Country Music to compose its own content without any human input or oversight. It’s unlikely this concern is why the CMT archive was eliminated, but it speaks to the complex issues facing media outlets today.
One of the risks of operating internet outlets is if the content disappears, there is no physical archive to call upon in the future. Many journalists sunk their lives into CMT stories, many artists benefited from the content, many fans learned about their favorite artists from the site, and many people used CMT’s archive as a resource to understand what happened in country music’s past.
Now, all of that is gone.
June 26, 2024 @ 11:33 am
Maybe a naĂŻve question, but why delete all the historical content? If they wanted to get rid of all their journalists and editors, why not simply put a period on the end of the sentence but leave the sentence? I need to be educated.
Chet Flippo is class. I had some personal communications with him back in the day. Always nice and courteous.
June 26, 2024 @ 12:55 pm
There’s nothing really to be educated about. I can’t come up with one legitimate answer, and I haven’t seen anyone else be able to either. It makes no sense, except for bean counters in an office somewhere who have absolutely no attachment to the music or the community decided it would be better to wash their hands of the whole mess entirely, or perhaps some pointy-nosed lawyer told them it was some sort of legal liability.
This is the callous, soulless calculations of the great American corporation.
June 26, 2024 @ 3:50 pm
Actually, it makes plenty of sense and the answer is obvious.
They see no benefit to advertising that the CMT website used to be “intellectual,” by current standards. That it offered articles written in standard English, containing sentences and paragraphs, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That seems quaint and radical now, when all you’re supposed to do is click on one link that takes you to a page that offers you other links to click on.
June 26, 2024 @ 12:58 pm
The past must be destroyed.
June 26, 2024 @ 5:05 pm
The servers and storage systems are not cheap to purchase, operate, and then replace every few years. Could be a factor. They will save some cash by taking it offline.
June 26, 2024 @ 5:37 pm
As someone who owns an 8,500-article archive, I can assure you that even with a very low ad profile like SCM has, you can easily make enough money to pay for the server space to host the articles indefinitely, especially if you’re CMT, which (used to be) a major news outlet that Google is likely to recommend near the top whenever someone goes searching for information about a country song or artist.
June 26, 2024 @ 11:46 am
The Internet Archive is a great resource for old web content. ALSO, tons of live music on there. Mostly Dead-adjacent, jam-ish audience recordings, like this recording of Chris Thile and Billy Strings opening the 2024 Telluride Bluegrass Festival
Below are some general links to:
Media Archives: https://archive.org/search?query=subject%3A%22CMT%22
Website Archives: https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://www.cmt.com/
June 26, 2024 @ 12:47 pm
Oops, forgot the link to the performance.
https://archive.org/details/billystrings2024-06-20/
June 27, 2024 @ 12:47 pm
I make a monthly donation to Internet Archive to help preserve these important links to history. Their lawyers are in court this week fighting to restore access to 500,000+ books after publishers won a lawsuit against the digital library.
June 26, 2024 @ 12:18 pm
Looks like Archive.org’s Wayback Machine has you covered at least to 2002. And apparently back in 1996 the cmt.com domain belonged to a company called Crimble Micro Test, ha. https://web.archive.org/web/20240626063650/https://www.cmt.com/
June 26, 2024 @ 12:59 pm
archive.org and the Wayback Machine can be good resources for deep research, but only if you know what you’re looking for. Whether it’s CMT, SCM, or any other outlet, the primary way folks are going to find that content is through Google. They do a simple web search, or it is recommended to them on a home page. Or, if they’re search for something on CMT specifically, they can use the site’s own search engine.
You can’t just Google “Chet Flippo Nashville Skyline” anymore and pull up the content. Us internet nerds know ways around it, but that’s sort of beyond the point.
June 26, 2024 @ 12:37 pm
Around 2005 or 2006, CMT did a series on “The Life and Times of” several singers. These were pretty good retrospectives on the lives of country legends. They have vanished from existence. Does anyone know where they might be? I am particularly eager to find the one on Merle Haggard.
June 26, 2024 @ 2:31 pm
Bummer…additionally, I’m seeing signs that No Depression is struggling, they have a constant pitch for donations on their main page. Music journalism is on the decline big time. And finding someone honest about it like Kyle here, is finding the ol needle in a haystack. Seriously, SCM fans have a champion in Kyle. He just keeps on, keeping on, busting hump to bring reliable info to us all. Treasure it folks.
June 26, 2024 @ 12:43 pm
Well, Trig, on the bright side– for you–is it moves SCM up another notch as a contermporaneous source for historical country/roots music information.
June 26, 2024 @ 3:27 pm
The death of history is a travesty. It’s downright sinful.
June 26, 2024 @ 3:38 pm
It’s a shame about the publications but hopefully CMT can finally die as well.
June 26, 2024 @ 4:06 pm
It would have been nice if Paramount had the foresight to partner with an internet archive to preserve this slice of internet history. But all they think about these days is how to cut costs quickly.
June 26, 2024 @ 4:28 pm
that would have cost too much. These companies are so deep in hock they can’t afford anything like that. The cheaper the programming the better.
I see videos on youtube of old shows we produced at TNN and it was just amazing. Now, unless it is a cheap reality show, it doesn’t make it on the air
June 26, 2024 @ 5:11 pm
Interesting. Digital can just *poof* disappear. Maybe print journalism will come back in some form. To make print disappear, you have to burn it — if you can find all the copies.
Time to get physical, yo.
June 26, 2024 @ 7:33 pm
Tell me if I’m too paranoid, Trigger.
Is it theoretically possible that an entire artist’s catalog can disappear off of streaming without any recourse from the artist? I mean, Taylor Swift and Neil Young voluntarily pulled their music from Spotify for about a year to make a moral point but after reading this, I’m more than a little concerned that a streamer owned by an Elon Musk type mogul could make arbitrary choices about who to de-platform just because he/she is an Elon Musk mogul.
June 26, 2024 @ 8:30 pm
I really don’t see this as a possibility. R Kelly’s catalog is still available. And even if one streaming service pulled an artist’s catalog, the others would still have it.
The difference here is CMT owns all of that content, and is the sole outlet serving it. So if they pull it, there is no recourse, even from the original authors of the articles.
June 27, 2024 @ 6:13 am
It’s nearly impossible to get something off of the internet if other people want it on the internet. Just look at the Panama papers, the DeCSS DVD Decrypter, the Streisand effect, or any attempt to stop online disinformation. It would only take a handful of fans to keep even the most hated musicians music online.
June 26, 2024 @ 9:10 pm
Further proof CMT and MTV are no longer relevant. Both channels are swamped with non musical content ant tasteless reality stuff.
There hasn’t been useful anything from them since 2000.
Perhaps the past articles can be accessed on the Internet Archive or Wayback Machine.
June 27, 2024 @ 4:58 am
This is part of an overall Paramount initiative extending to their other properties as well. Content from the Comedy Central & MTV websites have been moved to Paramount+
https://www.aol.com/entertainment/comedy-central-website-purges-25-225517270.html
June 27, 2024 @ 6:40 am
CMT was my go-to channel in the early 90s. I discovered so many artists that weren’t played on the radio that way. Since the advent of YouTube, they (and other video channels) have struggled to find relevance and make money. It’s a shame that they feel that it’s a viable option to delete anything of historical or intellectual value. It’s a lot like Nashville in general. The only value that seems to be placed on historical locations is “how many condos can we fit in here?” or “we need another bar here!”
June 27, 2024 @ 7:43 am
Ignorant corporate terrorism, plain & simple. And all that content could have been earning the stupid parent companies income via YouTube. But no…
June 27, 2024 @ 8:02 am
I can tell you with general certainty, but not with any definitive proof, that all that material is digitally stored *somewhere*. I would think that for legal and copyright issues, the company would be required to store that data, especially the articles and written material, since there would always be questions of ownership (the company or the creator).
As some have said, keeping the material posted online would have recurring costs. But the content itself is likely cataloged or indexed, then compressed and stored on some kind of media.
Images can use a lot of storage, since image compression is often baked into web-available image files (jpegs, pngs, etc) so you can’t make them *that* much smaller. But text files can be squashed into 10% of their original size, in most cases
A 20 terabyte enterprise-level hard disc costs less than $300 in many places. I have no idea what the size of their data might have been, but just a handful of that type of media can store an enormous amount of stuff.
Of course, I’m assuming they have a reasonably intelligent IT crew working for them who figured all this out in advance of any removals.
The trick now is coaxing it out of them and getting it posted somewhere. But it’s out there, somewhere.
June 27, 2024 @ 9:17 am
“reasonably intelligent IT crew” In my experience, that’s asking a lot LOLOL.
I do web development in biotech and we have a joke. Whenever we are introduced to a new company’s IT Team, we ask for their resumes so we can see what kind of “IT” we are going to be working with…
June 27, 2024 @ 8:38 am
When CMT and TNN merged, CMT should’ve had the TNN model and I’ll die on this hill. Reruns of shows like Dukes of Hazzard, Reba and Dallas, outdoor programming, the Opry on Saturday nights, biographies, auto racing, etc. TNN was a channel for southerners that featured country music. Country Music Television quickly stopped being that once TNN went off the air
June 27, 2024 @ 10:24 am
It’s funny how MTV and CMT are completely eradicating music from their offerings despite having “music” right in their names. Apparently even saying “music” out loud is akin to saying Voldemort’s name out loud.
June 27, 2024 @ 12:00 pm
Well, in all seriousness, MTV has drifted about as far from music as a music-related network can go. I’m willing to be they don’t show more than one or two actual music videos per week.
July 1, 2024 @ 10:09 am
I saw a meme recently of the MTV logo. Underneath it said, “MTV turns 43 years old this year. Thank you for 14 years of music!”
July 2, 2024 @ 7:48 am
CMT… CMT… where to begin? What happened to CMT? MTV is what happened to CMT. The executives there only care about pop, hip hop and rap.
CMT as a product is a literal dumpster fire. A shit show of epic proportions. They hardly play anything Country and when they do, they cut the songs off very early to play the likes of Maren “I Don’t Need Country Music” Morris and Kane “Listen To Me Sing In Monotone” Brown. JellyRoll, as entertaining as he is and can be, seems to dominate the channel now but isn’t Country. I gave up looking at the website a long time ago. It was hard to read, repetitive and mind-numbingly pedantic.
My wife likes to watch the weekly CMT countdown and even she has started to ask the question: “Where is the country music? All I hear is pop tunes and electronic beats.” She has, slowly but surely, been opting to watch reruns of Columbo on Saturday and reruns of Perry Mason on Sundays instead of the hot mess CMT shows every weekend from the likes of the “Bro Country” crowd who keep trying to keep it alive. Hell, they had Kane Brown on this past weekend and try as they may, they can’t convince me he is Country. And he literally has the single worst voice out of literally every other male performer ‘in the genre’, including JellyRoll.
CMT should now be an acronym for Country Music Tragedy because that is what it has become.
The channel and the website should just fade off into that sunset of obscurity because they are simply dragging the product into the abyss kicking and screaming and are showing no signs of slowing down.
CMT have become obviously stuck in their lean with the choices of endless “pop country” tunes they play while trying to shoehorn it all into the mouths of their willing yet reluctant audience who are simply craving COUNTRY MUSIC. It’s sickening and needs either course correction or it just needs to be taken out behind the woodshed and shot. It’s done. Stick a fork in it.
July 5, 2024 @ 9:56 am
CMT and MTV, among other networks and properties, belong to Paramount.
Paramount is hurting, due to a combination of cord cutting, not enough people picking up Paramount + and debt.
But, the name, history, content and reach still make Paramount a valuable asset.
Several companies have tried to buy Paramount.
Paramount is controlled by National Amusements, a theater chain operator controlled by Shari Redstone, daughter of the deceased founder Sumner Redstone.
NA owns less than 8% of Paramount’s stock but holds a good size majority of voting shares.
Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, has a son with an independent production company. He wants to buy Paramount and merge it with his company in a complex transaction.
Others are opposed to this.
Expect no changes or increased spending until the mess clears up.