MTV turns 30 today. To celebrate, we're running a bunch of pieces on the channel, its legacy, and its future.

via Tacky and Kitsch

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The first 59 minutes of MTV—12:01 a.m. to 1 a.m., exactly 30 years ago today—totally sucked. Not because the upstart cable network opened with the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star" (which still rules), or because of the clip for Pat Benetar's "You Better Run" that came a few minutes later (ditto). Not because of the affably bland ex-WPLJ DJ Mark Goodman, or how the ads for Mountain Dew, Trapper Keepers, or Dolby sound didn't hit their targets, either. That first hour—which you can watch right here—sucked because nothing made any sense. "All the V.J. segments were out of sequence," founder Bob Pittman later remembered. "They would say, 'That was,' and it wasn't, and 'Coming up is,' and it wasn't coming up. The polarization on the wires was also switched, so if you were listening in stereo, it was fine, but if you were in mono, it was canceling the sound out."

Pittman and the rest of the first MTV staff could be excused for screwing up their first hour of TV (only a handful of cable subscribers in northern New Jersey were watching anyway—even the founders had to head to a Fort Lee sports bar to tune in). These were mostly radio people, after all, trying to find a way to make some money in the fledgling realm of cable television. They picked a good time: the music industry was seeking any strategy to reenergize itself in the midst of a multi-year slump after disco flamed out. Like so many startups that aimed to merge existing ways of doing things, MTV was a kludge in its earliest years, but at the same time it was also a quiet miracle of technological convergence. Venture capitalists and tech geeks take note: MTV was the 1980s' most killer music app.

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Lady Gaga.

​Today the radio behemoth Clear Channel announced a festival celebrating the relaunch of its online service iHeartRadio, which currently allows listeners to tune into the chain's terrestrial-radio outlets from all over the country (as well as about 150 digital-only stations) and which will eventually allow listeners to personalize their stations, a la Pandora. The two-day iHeart Radio Music Festival, which will take place at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on September 23 and 24, has a star-studded bill and prices that are surprisingly decent for the amount of talent on display (single-day tickets start at $45 a pop before service charges). But what does the lineup say about the current status of each format in Clear Channel's arsenal—pop, hip-hop/R&B, country, adult contemporary, and rock? A brief analysis after the jump.

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Sorry guys.

​Hey, remember the RXP Tākliberty Festival, the WRXP-sponsored day of alt-rock at the PNC Bank Arts Center that was announced last Monday and going to have Coldplay as its headliner? Well, it's been canceled "due to unforeseen circumstances." Which actually isn't all that surprising given that the station sponsoring the day was sold last Tuesday to someone who is reportedly looking to ditch rock from the station's playlist altogether.

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Those of us old enough to remember listening to terrestrial radio for hours on end probably have a clutch of songs in our memories that we know, but we don't know--songs that could be hummed on demand, and maybe even sung for a bar or two, but that are effectively no-name tracks thanks to their being played, sometimes even in heavy rotation, but not named by the DJs breaking up the time between music and commercials. The trend away from what was called "back-announcing" in DJ parlance was pushed along by higher-ups who wanted to minimize "clutter"—basically anything that would cause listeners to flip away from the music being played, which for some reason included basic information like the titles and the artists of the songs that had just been spun and not things like that annoying squeaky-voiced ad for Raceway Park. (Ah, management!) But now back-announcing seems to be back in vogue—at least at the stations owned by CBS Radio, which has top-40 station 92.3 Now, oldies bastion CBS-FM and the horribly named "Fresh" in its local pocket.

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​"Marry The Night," the first song from Lady Gaga's Born This Way released via the uber-annoying "social game" FarmVille, is, like many of the album's other tracks that have been previewed so far, a throwback to a different time. Its minor-key stomp is accompanied by Gaga singing about how surrendering herself to the charms of New York's nightlife will save her from her heartbreak, and--perhaps in a stylistic nod to its lyrical New York shoutouts--it sounds a lot like a 2011-production-values version of the disco and freestyle tracks that used to dot the playlist of dance station WKTU before that station turned into a slightly less singer-songwritery carbon copy of its corporate cousin Z100, throwing all the old 12-inches out the window in favor of more Katy Perry. Which nobody needs! At all! This is a total longshot, I know, but it would be so great if Gaga's retro-flogging lit up the phones at KTU with people asking for "more songs like this," perhaps even name-checking a song or two from Last Dance At Studio 54, the compilation the station co-released back in the day. (The track list is pretty killer top to bottom, but Lina Santiago's "Feels So Good" is particularly notable at the moment because it's an obvious antecedent to Rihanna's "S&M.")

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​He did it on Hot 97 at noon; Rap Radar's got the stream and the download. Commercial-free and gleefully relentless, it's an excellent tribute to "a great man, a great rapper, a great humanitarian for hip-hop," as Mister Cee puts it, the heartbreaking catch in his voice eventually replaced by awestruck enthusiasm: "LISTEN TO THE GOD-DAMN DRUMS!"