What Did We Learn From The MTV European Music Awards?

The sixth most important award ceremony in the world, the MTV European Music Awards, took place last night. The euro-tripping Q4 counterpart to the VMAs, they’re the network’s second annual attempt at dominating the Monday morning news cycle. The follow-up event made sense when Europe and the US had vastly different music scenes, but now we’re all underling in Miley Cyrus’s totalitarian twerktopia it seems a bit pointless. Basically the EMA is a collection of the popstars that played the VMAs and are willing to fly all expenses to Europe to accept a piece of plastic that they’ll use as a #HUMBLEBRAG toilet roll holder.

Justin Bieber will win an award by default. Miley Cyrus will do something to keep her dominating the Jezebel think piece section. Anyone without a VEVO account, but a major talent, won’t be considered. MTV will make enough in advertising revenue to continue supporting things that aren’t music for the rest of the year, and the next day we’ll all write about it on the internet.

Soooooo, here we are! This is what we learnt from watching the MTV European Music Awards:

WHAT IS THE POINT OF THE MTV EUROPEAN MUSIC AWARDS

Here is a list of some people that won awards at the MTV VMA’s:

Justin Timberlake

Bruno Mars

One Direction

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

Thirty Seconds to Mars

And here is a list of some people that won the same awards under slightly different names at the MTV EMA’s:

Justin Timberlake

Bruno Mars

One Direction

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis

Thirty Seconds to Mars

They’re the exact same. Both award shows are fan-voted and the artists with the biggest fan base will win every time. If this approach is taken with movies, then Pirates of the Caribbean deserves the Palm d’Or, and La Haine doesn’t. But this isn’t the music equivalent of Cannes, and it’s not pretending to be. It’s expected that the most commercialised artists will win every award. But when both award shows are essentially identikit versions of each other, set in different continents, what’s the point? It’s the last surviving bastion of music programming not taking risks, and topping up their bank account with some Euros.

MTV ARE TRYING TO PUSH AN ARTIST CALLED AUSTIN MAHONE

Both award shows have a category dedicated to pushing a new artist. At the VMAs this is called the Artist To Watch Award, and at the EMA’s it’s called the Best Push Award. They’re the same thing and the same guy won them both. He’s called Austin Mahone, and despite having four million Twitter followers, I haven’t heard of him.

I was going to embed a video of his latest single “Banga Banga”, but I can’t because they’ve all been taken down from YouTube for copyright reasons (read: so everyone buys it on iTunes).

This is the first clear sign that Austin Mahone isn’t “An Artist To Watch” but an “Artist To Buy Into In Case Bieber Overdoses On Thai Hallucinogenics And Next Year’s MTV Music Awards Needs Saving”. That, or MTV no longer care for anything that can’t generate more than 50 million VEVO views. Or IDK, both and the fact that every single time I try to watch MTV they’re screening a show about pregnant teens in Milwaukee.

WEED EXISTS

This year the awards were hosted in Amsterdam, which meant a lot of jokes about smoking pot that would have been funny if weed was at least a little bit interesting. Miley Cyrus, after a night of revelry at a coffee shop, decided to spark up a blunt on stage after winning an award.