Music videos (such as seen on MTV) attract a younger audience than most TV programming. When TV was first introduced in the 1950s, very few programs (other than Dick Clark's "American Bandstand") targeted the teen-age audience. Family sit-coms existed and programs for children did; but, for a whole generation, until MTV was created, television had lost its appeal with teen-agers and twenty-somethings.

Radio, with its "rock and roll" programming, had attracted this young audience, a mobile group apt to listen to their music in their cars, their portable boom-boxes, and their Walkman transistors. Then, MTV, with its introduction of music videos with top-rate production values (camera work and editing) and exciting music brought the young back to their TV sets.

Music videos are usually accompanied by many ads for clothes and cosmetics, CDs and DVDs, cars and colas, rock concerts, first-run movies, appealing to a young audience with available "disposable income."