Behind The Scenes At MTV By Susan Ewing

The home of hit shows such as Jersey Shore, The Hills, and Rob Dyrdek‘s Fantasy Factory (to name a few), is where the Music Journalism crew ventured on Friday morning. MTV Networks, located in a colorful building in Santa Monica, gladly allowed us to come in and give us their insights of the way MTV works.

Joe Cuello, the Vice President of Creative Music Integration at MTV showed us all to a conference room, lit by sky light, and explained some of the ways MTV works. Cuello explained that the creative music integration section’s job is related to that of music journalists. He said that it is their job to fit music into a MTV program to get the artists’ music exposed to the public, just as a music journalist writes articles on the artists and gets them published so the public can read about the artist.

To give us a better understanding of this, Cuello and his assistant, Christopher Hetzner, showed us five of the same clips from the MTV show, The Hills, but each clip had different songs, with every song creating a different emotion from the previous. Cuello went on to say that because it cost so much money to get an artist such as Lady Gaga or Lil Wayne that it’s the creative music integrator’s job to look for artists that are up and coming or have a very low-key auditioning process to find a artist who would allow them to use their music for a very low price or even free.

Later, a senior publicist, AJ Sarcione, also came and spoke to us about his job. He informed us that he was the guy music journalists and other publishers keep in contact with all the time. Sarcione said if a new show was coming out at MTV or if the theme of the VMAs was decided, there would be a press release a couple months before so the public could be aware. After absorbing all of that information, Cuello led us to see an editing lab, where after all filming, the tapes are sent, turned digital and edited to become a MTV program.

As we left, we discussed how it was a great opportunity to see that aspect of the industry and to learn about everything that goes into one MTV program.