Mus-Mus-Musica! Videomusic’s Archive at Museo Nazionale del Cinema

Abstract

In 2019 Museo Nazionale del Cinema of Turin reached an initial agreement with Paramount Global to deposit the entire video archive of the Italian private television broadcaster Videomusic at the Museum’s film archive. Founded in April 1984 and active until June 1996, it was the first Italian broadcaster to have a schedule entirely dedicated to music programming. Of that television production there remains today a haphazard archive composed of a variety of obsolete video formats, including U-Matic and Betacam, consisting of more than 30.000 cassettes containing over 5.000 hours of programming. Thanks to the inventory work currently being carried out on the collection, this vast quantity of video cassettes and hours of programming is resulting in a dramatic increase in the amount of accessible Videomusic-related material. This proposal has several objectives: to reintroduce the production history of the television broadcaster in the Italian context; to attempt to define, if they exist, the points of contact between the production of the music and film industries; to begin to define the state of the ownership rights of the audiovisual material preserved in this collection; and to introduce the preservation, cataloguing, digitisation and making available policies developed at the film archive.