When MTVNews.com went offline in late June, Internet users were quick to discover that some (but sadly, not all) of the site had been archived in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. While you can no longer browse MTV News directly on the web, the archived pages are available via the Wayback Machine, starting with the first crawl of the site on July 5, 1997.
The same is true for CMT (Country Music Television) News, which was first crawled by the Internet Archive on January 10, 2002.
In response to patron requests, our engineers have created new search indexes for each site:
- Search more than 470,000 pages from MTV News (here’s a sample search for Peter Gabriel): https://web.archive.org/mtv.com/search/%22Peter%20Gabriel%22
- Search more than 70,000 pages from CMT News (here’s a sample search for Dolly Parton): https://web.archive.org/cmt.com/search/%22Dolly%20Parton%22
Why provide search indexes to music news? Because, as Michael Alex, founding editor of MTV News Digital, wrote in an op-ed for Variety, “the archives of MTV News and countless other news and entertainment organizations have a similar value: They’re a living record of entertainment history as it happened.”
It’s important to remember that these collections were captured as a routine part of the daily work conducted by more than one thousand libraries and archives collaborating with the Internet Archive to archive the web. For centuries, libraries have been the trusted repositories of culture and knowledge. As our news and information sources move increasingly digital, the role of libraries like the Internet Archive and our partners has changed to meet these new demands. This is why libraries like ours exist, and why web archiving is critical for preserving our shared digital culture.