I haven't watched it yet but, apparently, the documentary about Lollapalooza that was just released was largely based on content from their archive. I don't know the details but MTV was somehow involved in the production. So, that's all to say that their archives are undoubtedly a treasure trove of historically, culturally significant media. It's a shame only the select few get access to such a resource.
The same is true for so many archives and collections.
I think one of the worst crimes of modernity is to lock away knowledge and art for the sake of „protecting and sustaining it“ - copyright is broken and needs reform, the current system does not serve it’s intended purposes and we need to come up with something better.
I've known people working on archiving at big old media organizations, and one thing that is underestimated is the extent to which now inconvenient things are painted out of the archives.
For example, there was a large classic cartoon archive which had a whole team of retouchers painting out all the smoking.
The Internet Archive isn't immune to that either, unfortunately. Taylor Lorenz has leveraged her uncle to delete unfavorable stuff about her out of the Internet Archive :/
That's like in Canada we had Much Music which began after MTV but there was The New Music in 1979 three years before MTV existed. JD Roberts (before he became evil) and Jeanne Becker (went on to fashion journalism fame).
