For nearly ten years, adolescent millennials came home from school, threw their backpacks on the ground, and crowded the television to watch MTV count down the 10 most-requested videos from an iconic studio above Times Square. Now we can revisit those days with the implements of adulthood: charts and data.
From September 1998 through October 2007, MTV’s Total Request Live broadcast nearly 2,000 top-10 countdowns, featuring 975 different music videos, 240 of which spent time in the coveted #1 spot. Use the below tool to search for any song or artist to see when and where they spent time on the countdown.
Hover a square to follow one video. Click it to zoom in on that week.Tap a square to zoom in on that week, then tap a song for its full name.
Why the wall stops in October 2007. On October 22, 2007, MTV stopped ranking the countdown on viewer requests alone and started mixing in sales, radio play and online streams. The requests became just one part of the equation. That was a fundamental shift in what the show was, and the beginning of the end: TRL aired its final countdown a year later, in November 2008. So the wall ends on October 18, 2007, the last countdown ranked purely by request.
Let’s take a look at the defining moments inside TRL’s run, as defined by one nostalgic millennial data analyst’s selective memory.
Every month of TRL in 100 squares
Each column is one month; each square is 1% of that month's countdown slots. Line up a genre to follow it, and drag across the chart to pick a stretch of time.
Each line is one video's rank, day by day, from #10 at the bottom of a row to #1 at the top. Hover a line for the video, click it to find it on the wall. Click a name to see all of that act's videos on the wall.Tap a line to find that video on the wall, or a name to see all of the act's videos there.
Thanks for taking this trip back through time with me.
Kevin Klein