CMT (U.S. TV channel)

Country Music Television (typically abbreviated as CMT, previously as CMTV) is an American basic cable and satellite television channel that is owned by Viacom Music and Entertainment Group, a unit of the Viacom Media Networks division of Viacom. CMT was the first nationally broadcast cable channel devoted to country music and country music videos. Programming on the channel originally featured country music videos, taped concerts and biographies of country music stars, but now mainly consists of reality programs, off-network syndicated shows and movies with a minimal amount of music videos.

As of February 2015, approximately 86,989,000 American households (74.7% of households with television) receive CMT.

History

Early years (1983–1991)

CMT was launched on March 5, 1983, at 6:19 p.m. CT; it was created and founded by Glenn D. Daniels and up-linked from the Video World Productions facility in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Daniels put together the investor group of Telestar Corporation and the penny stock securities firm Blinder, Robinson & Company in a three-way ownership split.

Music television

Music television is a type of television programming which focuses predominantly on playing music videos from bands, usually on dedicated television channels broadcasting on satellite or cable. Music TVs may host their own shows charts, award prizes. Examples are Channel UFX,4Music, Channel V, VIVA, Scuzz, MuchMusic, Kerrang! TV, VH1, Fuse TV, and Palladia .

Country music

Country music is a genre of American popular music that originated in the Southern United States in the 1920s. It takes its roots from the southeastern genre of American folk music and Western music. Blues modes have been used extensively throughout its recorded history. Country music often consists of ballads and dance tunes with generally simple forms and harmonies accompanied by mostly string instruments such as banjos, electric and acoustic guitars, dobros and fiddles as well as harmonicas. The term country music gained popularity in the 1940s in preference to the earlier term hillbilly music; it came to encompass Western music, which evolved parallel to hillbilly music from similar roots, in the mid-20th century. The term country music is used today to describe many styles and subgenres. The origins of country music are the folk music of mostly white, working-class Americans, who blended popular songs, Irish and Celtic fiddle tunes, traditional ballads, and cowboy songs, and various musical traditions from European immigrant communities. In 2009 country music was the most listened to rush hour radio genre during the evening commute, and second most popular in the morning commute in the United States.

MTV

MTV (formerly an initialism of Music Television) is an American basic cable and satellite television channel which is a part of the "Viacom Music and Entertainment Group" unit of the Viacom Media Networks division of Viacom, of which it is a subsidiary. The channel itself is headquartered in New York City. Launched on August 1, 1981, the original purpose of the channel was to play music videos guided by television personalities known as "video jockeys," or VJs. The network's current target audience is teenagers and young adults, with programming consisting mainly of original reality, comedy and drama programming and some off-network syndicated programs and films, along with limited music video programming in off-peak time periods. In its early years, MTV's main target demographic were young adults, but today, MTV's programming is primarily targeted at teenagers, high school students and college-aged students.

MTV has spawned numerous sister channels in the U.S. and affiliated channels internationally, some of which have gone independent. MTV's influence on its audience, including issues related to censorship and social activism, has been a subject of debate for years.

Country

A country is a region that is identified as a distinct entity in political geography. A country may be an independent sovereign state or one that is occupied by another state, as a non-sovereign or formerly sovereign political division, or a geographic region associated with sets of previously independent or differently associated people with distinct political characteristics. Regardless of the physical geography, in the modern internationally accepted legal definition as defined by the League of Nations in 1937 and reaffirmed by the United Nations in 1945, a resident of a country is subject to the independent exercise of legal jurisdiction.

Sometimes the word countries is used to refer both to sovereign states and to other political entities, while other times it refers only to states. For example, the CIA World Factbook uses the word in its "Country name" field to refer to "a wide variety of dependencies, areas of special sovereignty, uninhabited islands, and other entities in addition to the traditional countries or independent states".^{[Note 1]}