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"You have to live life and work hard"
The problem: the whole rock music world seemed to be going nowhere, coming apart. Revenues from the sale of records and tapes sank more than 10% from 1978 to 1979, and no one seemed to have much idea what to do. Bob Pittman's solution: add television and create something new.
At 31, gray-suited and blow-dried, Pittman is executive vice president and chief operating officer of MTV Networks Inc., a joint venture of Warner Communications and American Express. He earns $200,000 a year, and has stock options valued at $1.8 million. He has the job because he invented it, because he and his audience are all what he calls the TV babies.
"These are people who grew up with television," he says, "who learned to do their homework, listen to the radio and watch television all at the same time. For these people, we needed to create a form that was nonlinear, using mood and emotion to create an atmosphere."
Pittman's father is a Methodist minister in Mississippi who taught him to "do whatever you think is right and stick with it." When Pittman wanted to take flying lessons, though, his father said he would have to pay for them himself. So he got a job as a radio disc jockey.
Pittman went off to nearby Millsaps College and became a deejay there; offered better radio jobs in Milwaukee, Detroit and then Pittsburgh, he kept transferring to new schools. Despite a strong interest in sociology, he never did finish college, but at 20 he became the program director of NBC's WMAQ in Chicago and switched it from middle-of-the-road pop to country music.
It was a special kind of country music, though, an odd hybrid called urban- country, which he pretested, like any academic sociologist, with audience surveys and focus groups. "I was ridiculed by other radio professionals and country-music experts," Pittman recalls. "They thought I was nuts. They were making primal sounds. But then the ratings showed we'd become the No. 1 country-music station in America."
By then one of NBC's prodigies at the network's main station in New York City, and outfitted accordingly in mustache, blue jeans and T shirts, he began saying as early as 1978 that "no one seems to know how to handle music very well on TV." NBC frowned on such views, so Pittman shifted to Warner. "Music is not frivolous, it is a major phenomenon," he says.
Pittman's idea for MTV was simplicity itself: get the record manufacturers to produce video commercials for their records and then use those elaborate and often fanciful commercials for most of MTV's broadcasting. After losing $50 million between 1981 and 1983, MTV made $8.1 million in the first half of 1984. It now has 24.2 million subscribers, up 60% in a year. A stock offering in August raised nearly $80 million. This month MTV will open a second channel called VH-1 (for Video Hits One), featuring romantic rockers such as Julio Iglesias and James Taylor for graying yuppies.
Pittman, now neatly shorn, sees social significance in his success. "America has done a 180 degrees turn from the early 1970s," he says. "Americans now understand that you can't drop out, that you have to live life and work hard. Families, babies and tradition (Pittman married in 1979, now has a son Bo, 18 months old). That is reality."
Ted Greene