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NEWS   05.01.07 9:00 PM PRINT | SEND TO A FRIEND |
MTV Awards May Head to Las Vegas
After bringing the MTV Video Music Awards back to their original home in New York last year, it looks like MTV is taking the show back on the road. According to several entertainment and hospitality industry sources, the cable network is looking to hold the 2007 show in Las Vegas, but has yet to sign a contract with a specific venue.

“If it’s not a done deal yet, it’s something they’re strongly considering,” a Las Vegas entertainment industry source told us last week. He heard the news from people inside Viacom, MTV’s parent company, and said that although he’s not a betting man—har, har—he would put money on the awards shenanigans taking place in Nevada.


The interest in Las Vegas has been a not-so-well-kept secret among people with ties to MTV, the VMAs, and the brands that typically host after-parties. But the exact location has been harder to determine. One entertainment industry source claimed to have heard that the network is close to signing with the Palms. The most obvious venue for the ceremony within that casino and resort complex is the Pearl, a multimillion-dollar concert space that opened in March with room for 2,500 people. The Pearl has three seating levels (each with its own bar and bathroom facilities), as well as 18 private and semiprivate skyboxes. On Monday a spokesperson for the Palms declined to comment on the situation.

New York, which has hosted the show 13 times, appears to be out of the running for this year’s incarnation. Representatives at Radio City Music Hall, the ceremony’s first and most frequent venue, and the Metropolitan Opera House, which hosted the VMAs in 1999 and 2001, said they were not in talks with MTV for this year’s event. If Las Vegas venue negotiations fall through, an entertainment industry source said he expects the show to return to Los Angeles, which has also housed the production several times and offers MTV easy access to talent and TV production needs. Los Angeles and Las Vegas are both expected to be less expensive for the network than New York.

MTV has not made any official announcements. A message left with its PR department and on Monday afternoon was not returned, and an MTV Networks event executive had no comment.

A possible move to Las Vegas is seen by some as an attempt to inject some excitement to the proceedings and bring back the broadcast’s dwindling ratings, although a move to Miami in 2004 and 2005 did little to retain television audiences. Last year’s ratings were down 28 percent, from 8 million viewers to 5.77 million the year before, although the show is still a considerable draw for younger viewers. The show once drew 12 million viewers.

Maybe a scheduling shift will help? Several sources say the awards will also move the date of the ceremony back to its original timing in September. The show was always held during the first two weeks of that month—most often on the Thursday after Labor Day—until 2002, when MTV moved it to late August to keep it away from the first anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks. The awards have taken place in the last week of August since then.

One source inside MTV said the event is tentatively scheduled for Sunday, September 9. The awards’ only other Sunday slots have been during their stints in Miami in 2004 and 2005.

That date would also put the show exactly a week before the September 16 broadcast of the Primetime Emmy awards in Los Angeles—meaning a lot of gift-suite organizers might have a busy couple of weeks.


  —Chad Kaydo, with additional reporting by Lauren Bienvenue & Courtney Thompson
RELATED TOPICS MTV, MTV Video Music Awards

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