MTV Music Channel Cuts & Rose Tinted Nostalgia

[Wayde Robson]

MTV's parent company Paramount-Skydance ended several of MTV's music channels on the night of New Year's Eve 2025. In reading about this I noticed a lot of older folks waxing nostalgic about the the network's good old days, the MTV of the 1980s when it was a music video channel. I think the nostalgia overestimates how much people watched music videos. I remember MTV and the tagline: "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll". If what I saw was rock and roll, it was cold-filtered and watered down by a team of corporate executives.

Of course, some music videos did interesting things with the medium. But overall, my memory of MTV was that of a top-40 radio station. Songs I loved back then didn't need an accompanying visual narrative beyond seeing the band's performance. I can't believe I'm the only one who remembers it that way.

The Myth of MTV's Golden Age

 

[rjplummer]

Robson seems to have 2 hypotheses:

1 "did video really add anything to music? "
2 "On-demand streaming, social media sharing, and music discovery algorithms have made MTV’s dedicated music channels irrelevant."

I think #2 is probably correct. But by far the most popular music streaming service is YouTube. And TikTok has a huge music listening audience. So I think video is more important to music than it was during MTV's heyday