CMT quickly realized that they needed to rethink their approach to visual content in order to become more appealing to audiences beyond the “typical country music fan.”
First airing in 1981, two years prior to CMT, MTV was clear in their vision of differing and standing out from “traditional TV” (Pittman, 1991). To create this new, fun, channel of counterculture, MTV used strategies of spectacle and extravagant videos, and the channel saw large success rates in correlation (Fenster, 1988).
Since CMT did not begin until 1983, MTV had already gone through trial-and-error years and established themselves as a household name (Frith, 2005, 96; Tannenbaum and Marks, 2012, 117).
). Therefore, CMT began to utilize strategies of MTV videos that had already proven successful to try to expand their viewership. Frith explains that “the aesthetics of country music videos are an attempt to adapt conventions established by and associated with rock and pop videos to the established conventions of country music” (107). Country music videos attempted to create similar elements of MTV’s extravagance by combining performance and visual narrative, differing from initial, more simplistic videos. A strategy central to MTV, 2002 Senior Vice President/General Manager of CMT, Brian Philips, explains, “‘We [CMT] are learning that the most surprising and unpredictable things we do get the biggest audiences’” (Larson, 2002).
