MTV2 Takes Its Show on the Road

Two much two soon? Not if the folks at MTV2 have anything to say about it. MTV’s younger sibling launches a low-priced concert series aimed at breaking upcoming acts--and heightening awareness of MTV2’s avowed mission to promote rising talent--on Saturday (which calendar watchers will recognize as 2/2/02).

The series, titled “$2 Bill,” has two components: the live show, which will take place in a different city each month, and a telecast over MTV2. Saturday’s inaugural show, in L.A., features New York neo-punk band the Strokes. Tickets are $2 and go on sale tonight at midnight at the Virgin Megastore on the Sunset Strip, with a limit of--what else?--two per person. The location of the performance is being kept under wraps until Friday.

MTV2 will air a 30-minute chunk of the concert live at 4 p.m. Saturday for the channel’s 37 million households around the country. (KROQ-FM [106.7] will air the audio.) Additional concerts will be held on the second of each month through the year. Acts confirmed include India.Arie, Alien Ant Farm and Jimmy Eat World.

“Most of 2001 was spent establishing who we are and our credibility in music,” says MTV2 General Manager David Cohn. “This next phase will be to start working with those bands ... to sort of jump off the channel and get closer to the audience with some of the bands that really are our lifeblood.”

The goal is to increase MTV2’s reach to something closer to that of its older, bigger brother, which is accessible to 77 million households nationally, Cohn says. MTV2 was born in 1996 but has been available in Los Angeles on Adelphia cable only since October, one indicator of the continuing struggle new channels face in the increasingly crowded cable world.

Compiled by Times staff writers