Video Music Box
Growing up in both Brooklyn and Queens, McDaniels, aspired to be a DJ. He attended New York Institute of Technology where he studied Communications–TV–Film and graduated in 1982. It was at this time that he started noticing an alarming array of talented hip-hop artists continuously being rejected and suppressed by mainstream media, and he wanted to give those overlooked artists a platform where they could be acknowledged by the consumers who craved them.
McDaniels decided to take matters into his own hands and approached a local TV station with an idea to host a music-video show. It was not enthusiastic about McDaniels’ idea but instead allowed him to host another popular local show with the same concept called Studio 31 Dance Party on WNYC-TV, a public-broadcasting station owned by the City of New York. After about a year of hosting that show, McDaniels got the opportunity to produce a show the way he originally wanted to do it and he appropriately named it Video Music Box (VMB).
It was not long before VMB’s 6-day, 60-minute public television viewership began to grow far beyond what any of the cable networks had expected. By 1995, Billboard magazine recognized the show and awarded VMB as the Best Local R&B/Hip-hop Regional Show. Additionally, the show was also notably voted as the Top-10 Greatest Hip Hop TV Moments by VH1 in 2003. By 2005, over 192,000 households per week were regularly viewing VMB. McDaniels had shined a light on an undertapped urban audience and literally answered its outcries against mainstream media’s disregard of its favorite artists with VMB.
In 1985, McDaniels became the first to broadcast a hip-hop tour, Fresh Fest, on VMB, which featured many of today’s hip-hop icons such as Run D.M.C., LL Cool J, Whodini, and many others. It was also through the broadcast of VMB that McDaniels was able to successfully register over 10,000 voters, which earned McDaniels tremendous respect and accolades in throughout the City of New York.
In 2010 McDaniels took the ground-breaking Video Music Box a step further and launched Video Music Box Global on WNYC-TV.
Read more about this topic: Ralph Mc Daniels
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“I fear I agree with your friend in not liking all sermons. Some of them, one has to confess, are rubbish: but then I release my attention from the preacher, and go ahead in any line of thought he may have started: and his after-eloquence acts as a kind of accompaniment—like music while one is reading poetry, which often, to me, adds to the effect.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)