Diddy’s music ‘Revolt’ will be televised
MTV and VH1 might have launched music television, but there’s a reason they don’t play many videos anymore — not enough people watch them.
Now rapper and media mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs thinks he can change that with a little help from the internet. He’s launching a new network today called Revolt TV that he says will play rap, hip-hop, and maybe even some country “if it’s funky enough, baby.”
Revolt is multi-genre and multi-platform; viewers can use social media to tell the network what they want.
“It has potential to let the prospective viewers of the channel feel like this is theirs — a sense of ownership in this thing right off the bat,” explains Larry Miller, a music industry consultant and NYU professor of music business. That’s key, he adds, because viewers don’t passively sit around watching music videos for hours anymore like they did in MTV’s heyday.
“But music is more popular than ever,” says Alan McGlade, managing director of Digital Entertainment Ventures. “The evidence of that is just the tremendous amount of consumption of music content online, so there’s still a huge appetite for it but there’s a new way to tap that audience.”
Revolt TV is starting off strong. The network got picked up by Comcast and Time Warner, two of the country’s largest cable providers.
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