A few floors up the tower in front of you there's a wall of glass that was, for about ten years, the most important window in American music.
The building is Fifteen Fifteen Broadway, and it stands on the bones of the Hotel Astor — a full block of marble and ballrooms, knocked down in the late sixties because the land was worth more empty.
MTV moved a studio in here in the late nineties, right against the glass, deliberately, at a height where the street could see up and the studio could see down.
Then in the autumn of nineteen ninety-eight they launched a show called Total Request Live, and the window became the point.
The format was simple to the edge of stupid. Ten music videos, ranked, and the ranking came from viewers voting that day. Whatever the audience picked was what went on the air. So a fifteen-year-old in Ohio could, in aggregate with several hundred thousand other fifteen-year-olds, decide what a national television network broadcast that afternoon. A video that staye
d popular too long got RETIRED off the countdown after sixty-five days, because the show needed churn more than it needed hits.
The voting got worked, obviously. Fan clubs organized, kids voted from every computer they could reach, and a song's position on national television came down to which group of teenagers was better at coordinating. They weren't only choosing the programming. They were do
