All Music, All the Time : The Box is what MTV started out to be, with the viewers doing the programming for an edgier, urban sound. But can its expansion-minded owners keep the grass-roots feel while going global?

It may be music on television, but the Box is not MTV.

MTV these days, despite the M for music, is a television network selling an elaborate youth-pop culture construct, where music is just one more component--albeit the one with the hook--along with fashion, attitude, products, politics and lifestyle. The enterprise obviously has been hugely successful, but its size and corporate nature make it lean heavily toward proven successes and away from new music--not to mention that the channel is placing more and more emphasis on television programming (dramas, game shows, news) and less and less on music.

The Box, however, is what MTV was semi-accurately labeled in its infancy: a radio station with pictures, a music video outlet. All music, all the time.

That is the first key to its identity. The other is apparent in its original name: Video Jukebox Network (still the name of the Box’s parent company). Viewers watching the Box can call a 900 number on the screen, punch in a code and, for 99 cents to $2.99, order one of 300 available videos. It plays soon thereafter, usually within 20 to 30 minutes, but sometimes less, sometimes more (especially on Friday and Saturday nights). Everyone else watching on that cable-TV system gets to see it too.

It’s like being music programmer of the minute--jukebox thrills in a bar as big as the neighborhood.

The Box’s slogan is “Music Television You Control,” and the belief its teen to twentysomething viewers have that they’re picking the music and the musical trends--instead of their being pre-selected by a network--is the other key to the Box’s identity.

Which means the Box can take chances that can open doors for artists and fans.

“I see a lot of music on the Box I don’t see anywhere else,” says Sean Fernald of Relativity Records. “They give new artists a really fair chance. And they let us know right away if we have a record or not.”

And because the Box also helps record companies answer the perilous question “What music do people like?” it is rapidly making itself invaluable.

“I don’t take a step without the Box,” says Mark Klein, director of national video promotion for Epic Records, who credits it with breaking Jamaican dancehall singer Patra. “They’re included in everything I do.”

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The Box struggled for years after its founding in 1985; the Miami-based operation was in only 400,000 homes as late as 1990, completely dependent on revenue from viewer calls, which didn’t cover operations or expansion. But in the last two years, the Box has been bursting its wrappings. Major new investments--primarily from StarNet, a satellite cable programming company that is a division of LenFest Communications, and Communications Equity Associates, which together bought more than 40% of the company; and from Island Records founder and entrepreneur Chris Blackwell (an astute and somewhat iconoclastic figure whose discoveries have included Bob Marley, U2 and Melissa Etheridge), who bought 12%--have given the company a $9-million jump-start.

Blackwell also gave the company an image boost with its new home, across the street from his Marlin Hotel in Miami’s trendy South Beach.

Last January, the Box opened its new headquarters with a big bang Super Bowl weekend street party where thousands watched Bush, Mary J. Blige, Collective Soul and a tear-the-roof-off rap jam of “One Nation Under a Groove” led by Ice Cube, with guests like Naughty by Nature, Salt-N-Pepa, Cypress Hill, A Tribe Called Quest and others.

Meanwhile, Alan McGlade, former head of StarNet, came on as chief executive officer and has been heading a host of new activities: aggressively working to get on more cable systems, introducing advertising, expanding overseas and into the U.S. Latin market, merchandising a line of clothing and CDs, getting on the Internet, arranging a network of radio affiliations and implementing pre-programmed satellite feeds (courtesy of StarNet) to small, formerly unprofitable cable systems.

“We’re the guy on ‘Ed Sullivan’ with 10 sticks with plates on them,” says Executive Vice President Les Garland, a former radio programmer who was one of the founders of MTV, a guy who talks with the sometimes overwhelming speed of a radio jock and the enthusiasm of a teen-ager. “And all those plates have to keep spinning.”

So far, the plates seem to be staying in the air. The Box is available in more than 21 million homes in the United States, Britain (where it is higher-rated than MTV) and Puerto Rico, and last year it logged more than 6 million calls. In the Los Angeles area, the channel reaches more than 1 million homes on 11 cable systems.

New advertisers, including Pepsi, Reebok, Nintendo, Levi Strauss and MCI, helped to reduce the percentage of revenue from viewer calls from 100% five years ago to 70%.

“We came into 1995 with no debt, money in the bank and a very solid business plan to expand distribution and revenue,” McGlade says. “I think we’ve made terrific progress.”

Now, all they have to do is get out there in more homes--no easy task with the ever-growing numbers of program services scrapping for space on cable systems whose channel capacity is filled. Bill Marchetti, an analyst with Paul Kagan Associates, a Monterey, Calif., media research and consulting firm, says it could be difficult for the channel to promote itself as being different enough from MTV and VH1 for cable operators to take on another music service.

“It’s tough to project how many homes they’ll get into,” Marchetti says, adding that the Box has not grown as much this year as other mid-size cable channels such as E! Entertainment, the Learning Channel and Court TV. Still, he says, “they’ve been doing all the right things,” and he predicts that the Box will do well, particularly as channel capacity grows.

“It should make for a rating that’s solid throughout the day. And it’s not something that you’re going to find anywhere else.”

O ne thing you’ll find there is new music. The Box has a reputation for playing new artists and new videos first, often before radio. It was first with videos by such now-successful performers as Green Day, Dr. Dre, Heavy D, Toni Braxton, 4 Non Blondes, Notorious B.I.G., Snoop Doggy Dogg, En Vogue and Jodeci.

TLC, whose “Waterfall” won best video of the year at the MTV awards, had its first video on the Box in 1992, before the female rap trio got airplay on either radio or MTV; it was so successful that the channel actually called representatives at the group’s label to let them know they had a hit.

The most recent success story is Cleveland rappers Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, whose debut EP went quadruple platinum almost entirely on the basis of Box play last year, and whose subsequent LP debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s album chart. Naturally, stories like this have earned the Box a central niche in the music industry’s canny heart.

“The Box has been one of the single most important vehicles for launching new artists on the street level,” says Craig Kallman, senior vice president at Atlantic and president of two subsidiary labels, Big Beat, which releases hip-hop, reggae and dance, and alternative rock label Tag Records. “They’re able to add a lot more videos, they have incredibly diverse programming, and they’ll step out on records that don’t have a story yet.”

Kallman says early Box play of Changing Faces, a group produced by R&B; star R. Kelly, generated so much demand that radio stations started taping the song off the channel because they couldn’t get the record yet.

Says Steve Stevenson, director of national video promotion for Warner Bros.: “They’ve definitely got a viable audience that has proven to not only break groups but sell records. And it’s an active audience--if they’re willing to put down money for a video, they’re probably willing to put down money for a CD.”

It’s often a hip-hop CD; the channel has been a haven for black music, a major source of its grass-roots appeal and industry support.

“The real problem is MTV’s lack of emphasis on urban music,” says Henry Hample, associate editor of Vibe, the magazine of black music and culture started by Quincy Jones. “Rap or R&B; is 70% of the Top 20, but it’s only about 20% of what’s on MTV. I definitely think the Box is the channel breaking new hip-hop artists.”

The Box’s programming director, Frankie Blue, a respected radio veteran who came on this year after a decade at New York’s WHTZ-FM (“Z100”), says he and his staff look at 80 to 100 new videos a week, adding anywhere from 15 to 25, trying to keep a balance between established and new artists and also between styles like hip-hop, rock and so on. “It’s like filling a huge jukebox,” he says.

At the same time, Blue balances individual Box mixes according to what’s popular in those cities: “You have to focus on each market. So what you see in Chicago is different from what you see in Los Angeles or Detroit or New York or Miami.”

And while Blue says he and colleagues keep their ear to the street, via club deejays, independent record stores and general networking, they can still be surprised.

“In radio you can control the programming,” he says. “With the Box it’s harder. I can give a song an opportunity, but when it does happen, it’s much cooler, ‘cause it’s the viewers that have chosen that song.”

When, for instance, the channel put on an acid-punk version of the traditional country song “Cotton Eyed Joe” by a Swedish band called the Rednecks, Blue figured it was a longer-than-long shot, although the song had been a hit in Europe and in clubs in Los Angeles, New York and Miami. Much to everyone’s surprise, it ended up as a Top 5 Box video, which Box folks like to cite as the perfect example of “you never can tell.”

B ut it’s precisely that openness that has created the situations for which the Box has earned the most criticism.

Because the channel plays more on-the-edge videos--particularly with such styles as Miami-style bass (a la 2 Live Crew) and gangsta rap--the Box began to find itself with a reputation as a “booty channel” and facing accusations (along with the rest of the industry) that it promotes sexist and violent imagery. This produced occasional controversy, as when the Box aired Madonna’s “Justify My Love” in 1990, when MTV wouldn’t, and one Glendale cable company removed it after viewer complaints.

Garland and Blue defend that and other selections as viewer choices (“If someone has a problem with our showing ‘Justify My Love,’ I’ll give them the names of everyone who requested it,” Garland says).

Still, the Box straddles a difficult line in the censorship-versus-responsibility debate. At what point, given that viewers make the choices, is the channel responsible for the choices offered? The answer has been to institute a standards-and-practices committee to look at questionable videos, and the channel now sends them back to the labels if they are deemed offensive.

The other criticism has been that the Box allows labels to unduly influence programming. The channel recently instituted promotional packages of ads and guaranteed rotation, but the most potentially egregious method is called “jacking the Box,” where labels organize phone campaigns to get their videos on, whether by asking interns to call up one night or paying independent promoters to make hundreds of calls; jacking was the subject of expose articles in Newsweek and Vibe earlier this year.

Label reps say it is common practice; moreover, most see it as an acceptable form of promotion.

“The industry has always done this,” says Steve Leeds, vice president of video promotion for Island records, comparing it to fan clubs calling radio stations. “Things need to be jump-started.”

And why shouldn’t they? “What’s the difference between a label paying someone to call and me calling up one night?” asks Epic’s Klein.

The difference, of course, is volume and the deeper capacities of industry pockets. Garland vociferously defends the channel’s integrity, saying that all promo package plays are very limited and identified as such and that jacking affects only a tiny part of total plays.

The sheer volume and cost of calls will probably limit jacking in the end.

“If you have to call a million times to create the impression that a record is a diamond, then it’s not,” independent New York video promoter Mark Weinstein says flatly. “Besides, the bottom line is that anyone who calls in a video gets to see it.”

Viewer choice is the ultimate control on label influence--and a key to the ultimate question about the Box’s future. Can its executives keep providing what they say they will, a corporate outlet for music programmed from the bottom up, grass-roots pop culture on a global scale?

“That’s going to be the cornerstone of their remaining successful,” says Atlantic’s Kallman. “If they homogenize the programming too much, become more corporate . . . if by increasing their reach they lose that edge, I think they will suffer.”

Says Garland: “How long can we sustain just being a music channel? I’d like to think forever. . . . If we start putting other stuff in, I would be very fearful of our future.”

Besides, he adds: “Let’s not put too much importance on what we’re doing in the whole scope of the television landscape. If you take all the music channels together and combine their ratings, it won’t even compare to Fox. So we have to develop and super-serve a niche audience and do it right.”

And to do that, the Box needs to stay outsider-, interactive-, youth- and music-oriented.

“There’s a certain attraction right now to being independent,” he says. “Yes, there’s one side of us that thinks it would be great to be in the mix with Seagram’s [parent company of MCA] or Disney. But I’m not sure those companies would allow the Box to be what it is. It’s different.”*