MTV News is laying off a bunch of their writing staff to shift toward video and short form content for a younger audience. Variety reports:

Among the most significant changes — MTV has reached an agreement with the Writers Guild of America East to represent MTV News staff members. As part of that agreement, MTV News is parting ways with fewer than a dozen staffers and several freelancers. The news division is in the process of hiring additional personnel to focus on video and short-form content.

I actually thought MTV had been putting out some pretty good written content over the last year. A shame to see how difficult making money online has become for most publishers.

Hazel Cills, writing at MTV:

While male producers and musicians like Philip Glass and Steve Reich have been written about and documented extensively, the work of female producers and early electronic musicians like Wendy Carlos, Laurie Spiegel, Delia Derbyshire, and more have essentially been ignored and undervalued by music historians. To combat the stereotype that production is solely a man’s job, The Blow created an online archive, womanproducer.com, to collect photos and clips of female producers in history. Recently, the archive has expanded into a live event series at Brooklyn’s National Sawdust, featuring performances and talks by artists like Zola Jesus, Neko Case, and more.

Elias Leight, writing for Rolling Stone:

MTV plans to rebrand VH1 Classic as MTV Classic starting on August 1st. According to a statement from the company, the new channel will focus on “an eclectic mix of fan-favorite MTV series and music programming drawn from across its rich history, with a special focus on the 1990s and early 2000s.”

All of our childhoods one day become “classic.”

Miles Raymer, writing for MTV, looks at some ideas on fixing copyright law in how it relates to musicians and clearing samples:

Menell’s solution is to apply something called a compulsory license to sampling, remixing, and other derivative works. Compulsory licenses replace the process of gaining a copyright holder’s permission to make use of their original work with a flat royalty structure and a set of rules for how the work can be reinterpreted. We already have this kind of setup for cover songs: Under U.S. copyright law, anyone can perform and record any song that anyone else has written and recorded without getting their prior permission, as long as they pay a royalty to the copyright owner. This is why pop-punk bands can cover Top 40 songs, why iTunes is full of sound-alike cover versions of hit songs by artists it doesn’t have deals with, and why hip-hop producers often hire instrumentalists to play “interpolations” of musical passages they want to sample but can’t clear.

Steven Zeitchik, writing for the LA Times:

“Unplugged,” which could be on the air in coming months, will stoke the interest of those who came of age with artists such as Nirvana, Eric Clapton and Arrested Development breaking down their music to its acoustic basics, often with some added atmosphere.

“It won’t be carpets and candles,” Erik Flannigan, executive vice president of music and multiplatform strategy, said of the new show. “And it won’t be rock legends playing their catalog. “What we want to do,” he said, “is take the attributes that made ‘Unplugged’ such a success for so many years and reimagine them for 2016.”