MTV Iggy

» see mtviggy.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

On 30 April 2007 MTV Networks switched off three cable channels on the same day. MTV Desi had been built for South Asian American households, and MTV Chi and MTV K covered the Chinese and Korean ones. All of them were sold as premium add-ons, and the distribution model never pulled in the subscribers that the advertising depended on.

MTV Iggy was the replacement and it was online only. The site was live by 18 October 2008, which is its first capture in the Internet Archive, and MTV announced it that December as a destination for Desi, Chinese, Korean and Japanese youth worldwide. The navigation in that early capture still lists the inheritance plainly: global, chinese, korean, desi. Nusrat Durrani, the senior vice president who had run MTV World, ran this too.

In October 2011 it was relaunched as something larger than a website. On 13 October MTV put out a release introducing Iggy as a multi-platform global music brand for American audiences, and four days later The MTV Iggy Show premiered on mtvU, half an hour a week of music from everywhere, repeated on MTV and MTV2. Durrani's line in the release was that Iggy offered a US stage for artists who were catching fire around the globe.

The entire product was aimed at explaining the rest of the world to Americans. I was in the rest of the world. K-pop and Bollywood did not need an MTV vertical to reach Ankara, and Turkish radio had been carrying music from outside the English-speaking world for as long as I had been listening to it. Iggy was solving a problem I did not have.

Billboard reported in early September 2015 that Iggy was shutting. The site kept publishing after that. The Internet Archive holds fresh front pages through 12 November 2015, and by 9 December every request to the domain was a redirect.

~ the dossier ~

~ best new band in the world ~

The competition ran on a global fan vote. Ten breakthrough acts went up in 2011, drawn from the United Kingdom, Australia, Jamaica, Malaysia, Pakistan, the United States and South Korea, and the winner was announced on 10 November and played an MTV Iggy Live session in Times Square. 2NE1 won it.

That was a year before Gangnam Style, and well before American media started treating K-pop as an inevitability. MTV had a Korean girl group taking a worldwide vote on its own property, and built nothing lasting on top of it.

~ what it played ~

The editorial range was wider than the competition suggested. Iggy covered K-pop and J-rock, Bollywood soundtracks, Latin alternative and Afrobeat, in a mix of reporting and live sessions. There was a partnership with Intel called The Music Experiment. There was the Times Square concert. For a few years it was the only place inside a major American music brand where a band with no English-language single got written about as a band rather than as a curiosity.

~ the unraveling ~

2015 was a bad year at MTV in general. Ratings were falling, more than two hundred staff were laid off, and several senior executives left. In that climate a vertical that was not the main brand had to justify itself, and the people quoted afterward said Iggy could not.

One executive told Billboard the content was all over the place. An insider put it another way: Iggy had been isolated and left alone, and that laboratory model did not work at the company any more. Both of those describe something that was permitted to exist while there was money, and was not once there wasn't.

~ the gap ~

The distance between the announcement and the silence is the part the published record misses. The Portuguese Wikipedia article says July 2015. Billboard says early September. The Internet Archive says the front page was still being rebuilt with new material on 12 November 2015, under the tagline it had always carried, the future of music.

The first redirect appears on 9 December 2015. Somewhere in those four weeks the last person with a login stopped posting, and mtviggy.com turned into an address that pointed at something else.

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