MTV quickly became a cultural juggernaut in the 1980s after its 1981 launch, bringing new music to millions of households whose access to music videos had been previously limited to late-night programs. It's not surprising that others attempted to cash in on their success, and in the fall of 1984, enterprising media mogul Ted Turner made his attempt to do so with the blandly-named "Cable Music Channel."
The network launched at midnight EST on October 26, 1984, with a very awkward press conference featuring Network President Robert Wussler, Los Angeles Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson (who declared the day "Cable Music Channel Day"), General Manager Scott Sassa (who now works for Robert Rodriguez's El Rey Network) and Turner himself, promising that the network will "stay away from excessively violent or degrading clips toward women that MTV is so fond of running." Heck, don't just read my description - watch the awkwardness unfold.
CMC tweaked the MTV format slightly, doing live VJ segments with unseen VJs rather than the bigger network's pre-recorded video segments. This gambit, along with the veering away from "controversial" music videos, failed to pay off, and the network didn't find an audience, even with commercials like the one below, featuring Randy Newman, Steve Miller, Corey Hart, Little Richard and Sparks (!).
It's not that the network was really even given a chance to succeed. On November 29, only 34 days after the network's launch, it was sold to MTV Networks for a rather pathetic sum of a million dollars, signing off the very next evening with the same video that launched the channel - Randy Newman's "I Love L.A." - interspersed with goodbyes from the folks who worked at one of the shortest-lived cable channels in history.
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