Full disclosure: I work at ZoomerMedia where Moses Znaimer is the CEO. In fact, I report to the man. So sure there may be a conflict of interest here but perhaps more importantly, there is insight from quietly observing a TV visionary in action for well over five years.

As many of you have read, Bell Media recently axed 91 jobs from MuchMusic, ostensibly gutting the iconic music station into a shadow of its formerly glorious self when Znaimer and John Martin founded the “temple of rock” in 1984. The news comes as a somber denouement to an arc that peaked in 2006 when CTVGlobemedia bought Much and a stable of other specialty channels from then owner CHUM Limited for $1.7 billion.

During that same year, search giant Google also made a hefty acquisition of its own for roughly the same amount, purchasing the year-old video sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. Fast-forward eight years and YouTube is now serving six billion videos to one billion unique visitors monthly, receives 100 hours of uploaded video every minute, has users from all age groups who use the site monthly (70% Millennials, 58% of Gen Xers and 49% of younger Boomers) and grossed $5.6 billion in worldwide ad revenue last year. MuchMusic, in the meantime, has suffered from this tectonic shift away from linear music broadcasting to on-demand video consumption that often didn’t even require a television set, let alone scheduling.

“Kids do not watch music videos on television,” lamented Bell Media president Kevin Crull who blames a CRTC restriction that forced the company to air 12 hours of music videos daily. “You’re not going to wait for somebody to program a music video when you have a million available on Vevo.”

The cuts have served as a tipping point for the original and now older Much fans who’ve long complained about the station losing its made-in-Toronto edge for non-musical, widely available US programming like The Cleveland Show. Triggered by a recent piece that appeared in BlogTO and then another item by former Much DJ Master T in The Huffington Post, an online movement to bring Much back to its original founder Moses Znaimer is picking up steam. Between tweets and Facebook Likes with the #givethembacktomoses hashtag, over 50 thousand social media users have been pinged. And as crazy as the idea may sound, it kind of makes sense.

Here are five reasons why:

1. Getting a twentysomething crowd to watch music TV is a lost cause.

Research shows the average human attention span (8 seconds) has sunk below that of a goldfish (9 seconds). One reason is information overload. It explains why youth content is increasingly short (ie Snapchat, Instagram, viral videos) and on-demand (Vevo, Netflix and Hulu). Even worse, the Much target demo is leading the way in cord-cutting. Conversely, studies show consumers over 50 still have normal attention spans and watch linear TV. Guess who owns large databases of these viewers? Znaimer.

2. Retro is cool.