AMN has been on Austin's local cable systems for about a decade now and it has never been suckier. I can't really recall watching it too much in those first few years, but it did have a nice run there for a while in the late '90s when they actually bore a very positive resemblance to early MTV (i.e., regularized programming with decent VJs and interesting videos and club peformances). My day was pretty much made when I could tune in to check out this one VJ named Leanna Holmquist. She is absolutely the hottest babe to ever pixilate my televizzision.
But, in the past few years, AMN has been almost unwatchable. I have no idea what the fuck they're doing ---and neither do they. They've got a lot of unlikeable and amateuish nonsense going on over there. Yeah, yeah: their budget's been cut and they've had to move into Kenneth Threadgill's garage, but that's only because they suck.
The problem with AMN is the same as the city's: they bought into the nauseating myth that the Austin music scene was some sort of paradise of rarefied wonderfulness. Now, not being a musician, and only an infrequent patron of the clubs here, I don't have too much of a right to make any qualitative criticisms, but I'll suffice it to say that a lot of people in the music community have been reading their own press. That is to say, there's a lot of lame shit out there. There's also no question that this town is blessed with some world-class musicians and songwriters but, most of the time, they're either here for SXSW or for an Austin City Limits concert.
My point, if I have one, is that Austin is real proud of its self-proclaimed status as the live music capital of the world, but that it hasn't done nearly as much as it could to promote that. They've only recently gotten around to accomodating musicians who have to move their equipment into and out of downtown clubs by designating loading zones for that purpose. (The cops will give you a whole 20 minutes before they ticket your car.)
Theoretically, AMN should have been a money-maker. It could have been financed and marketed in such a way that it could have increased our exposure on at least a regional scale, bringing in more tourist dollars and sweetening the pot for our local musicians. But, that's not going to happen now. They've frittered away a lot of good will and now it's all but certain that they're going to go off the air.
Maybe Time-Warner could take it over and revive it, even if it means supplanting a lot of the local flavor with more popular stuff. I don't know. But, it would be nice to have an alternative to MTV, which doesn't even play music videos anymore.