How did MTV turn songs into pictures, and who did it leave out at first?

MTV turned songs into pictures by playing music videos all day, every day, on cable television. It launched on 1 August 1981 and originally aired music videos presented by video jockeys, or VJs, and the first one played was "Video Killed the Radio Star" by the Buggles. A music video integrates a song with imagery, and modern ones are mainly a marketing device meant to promote sales of recordings. The format had been growing: promotional videos became popular in the 1960s, and the Beatles in 1965 began making promotional clips so they could promote records without appearing in person. In 1975 Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" video is credited by one rock historian as the first global hit single for which a video was central to the marketing.

Cheaper, easier-to-use video equipment and visual effects such as compositing helped make videos practical. MTV also had to be asked for: a campaign with stars like Mick Jagger and David Bowie told viewers to call their cable providers and request the channel.

But in its first years MTV played very few Black artists. It refused some videos, such as Rick James' "Super Freak", because they did not fit its album-oriented rock format. David Bowie questioned the channel's lack of Black artists in an on-air interview in 1983. MTV's music programming director later said it had been designed as a rock channel and found it hard to find African American artists whose music fit, while critics replied that record companies were not funding videos for Black artists because it would be hard to get MTV to play them. Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" was not put into medium rotation until it reached number one, and how it got there is disputed: the president of CBS Records threatened to pull the label's music from MTV, while MTV's Les Garland said he aired it without pressure from CBS. After Jackson's "Thriller" video raised the bar, the network backed it fully and more pop and R&B videos followed.