Tarkan: The End of an Era

Posted by Hatice Soylu from Istanbul, Turkey and Steffan Matrak from Moscow, Russia

Tarkan has shared a post marking the transition of major music station Kral taking its TV channel off the terrestrial airwaves and moving solely to online streaming on 1 February.

Achieving complete digitisation in its 25th year, Kral TV was the first MTV-style channel of its generation, and heralded in a music video platform for Turkey in the nineties - and along with it a slew of iconic pop stars.

The music television channel was launched in August 1994, and as Turkey's first music TV channel, it triggered the rise of other Turkish music channels and gave a different direction to the music industry in Turkey. Today, its vast archives document the rise and fall of a short-lived million dollar industry.

It is for this reason that the "loss" of a long-standing music channel on Turkish TV has been marked by one of its most popular sons with sadness.

In his share on Friday, Tarkan wrote of his sadness of the end of an era, but knew that the station "would continue its successes online".

Kral has been struggling financially for some time, having stopped presenting its annual industry awards in 2016. It had also been accused by some pop stars of favouritism and award-vetting, with non-recipients constantly boycotting the awards evening - which had not been organised since 2013.

Kral station exec Mehmet Akbay in a TV report spoke about this, and intimated that stars had not shown Kral TV enough support - and when they did it was too late.

"Tarkan was the first to call me over the shutdown of our TV music channel asking whether there was anything he could do," Akbay said, who is overseeing the digitisation of Kral.

But Akbay stressed that Tarkan agreed the move away from traditional airplay was "the right thing to do".

Fifth Music Video on Way

Tarkan was back on social media on Saturday to share a still from his fifth music video off 10. Heralding its drop "at the start of the week", the surprise choice is "O Sevişmeler" by 90s collaborator Ümit Sayın.

UPDATE: Fifth video released >>

Tarkan had posted a video in December last year to tell his followers he was filming a fifth music video off his 2017 album, and followed it with a still from the shoot nine days later, while Tarkan's own company HITT Productions had tweeted the name of the track for the fifth drop on the same day as Tarkan's photo share last year.

And according to Tarkan's post tags on 2 February yesterday, the music video was filmed under the direction of Altan Dönmez. Dönmez also directed the singer in "Pare Pare" (Metamorfoz, 2007) and "Uyan" (Uyan, 2008).

Outside of direction, Dönmez worked on other Tarkan videos, including hits "Salına Salına Sinsice" (Ölürüm Sana, 1997), "Kuzu Kuzu" (Karma, 2001), "Sorma Kalbim" and "Gülümse Kaderine" (Dudu, 2003).

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