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

 

[lovinthehd]

LOL remember we had it in our roommate living setup from day 1. We often just left it running, and had the tv connected to the stereo too. Suited our attention spans at the time .

 

[m. zillch]

Their debut video predicted what would happen: