Published: January 3, 2025

Reading time: 5 minutes

So MTV shut down its music channels on New Year’s Eve. MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV, MTV Live—all gone. Globally. The last video they played? “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Full circle moment. Poetic. Whatever.

Here’s the thing that keeps bugging me: where were the thought pieces?

The New York Times didn’t cover it. The Guardian mentioned it in passing. Detroit Free Press? Nothing. Not even a sidebar. And these are publications that’ll run 2,000 words on a TikTok trend or the cultural significance of a Netflix show’s costume design.

But an institution that shaped music culture for 44 years goes dark, and it’s basically a footnote.

The Silent Death

I’ve been chewing on this for the past week and have been trying to figure out if I’m just old and nostalgic, or if there’s something genuinely strange about how quietly this happened.

MTV already stopped being about music years ago – probably around the time Jersey Shore became their flagship programming. The main channel’s been running reality shows for so long that most people under 30 probably don’t even know MTV started as Music Television. So maybe the death of the music-only channels wasn’t newsworthy because MTV’s cultural death already happened a decade ago.

But here’s what I can’t shake: Where does this leave mainstream viewership for music videos?

The YouTube Problem (That Isn’t Really a Problem)

The obvious answer is YouTube. And yeah, that’s where everyone watches music videos now. I do it. You do it. My parents do it. The algorithm serves you what it thinks you want, you can watch any video from any era at any time, and there’s no waiting for your favorite song to come up in a rotation.

But here’s the thing about YouTube that nobody really talks about: it killed communal music discovery.

When MTV was still MTV, you’d come home from school, flip on MTV2 or MTV Jams, and whatever was playing—that’s what you watched. You didn’t choose it. Sometimes you discovered something incredible just because you were too lazy to change the channel. That’s how I first heard Madvillain and Moby (BodyRock (1999)). That’s how a lot of people my age first saw OutKast’s Hey Ya video or Missy Elliott doing her thing. There are so many musical discoveries from MTV that shaped my childhood. My first exposure to Stevie Ray Vaughan (Pride and Joy (1989) video compilation), George Harrison (I Got My Mind Set On You (1987)), Taking Back Sunday (Make Damn Sure (2006)) came from MTV’s runtime.

YouTube doesn’t work like that. YouTube gives you what you already like, or what people who like what you like also like. It’s an echo chamber disguised as infinite choice.

MTV – when it actually played music – forced you into the unfamiliar. And sometimes the unfamiliar becomes your favorite thing.

Why Didn’t Anyone Care Enough to Write About This?

This is what I keep coming back to. Rolling Stone covered it. Consequence did a piece. Some trade publications. But the big papers, the ones that love cultural retrospectives and “end of an era” features, mostly ignored it.

My theory? They didn’t write about it because it doesn’t matter anymore.

And that’s the depressing part.

Music videos aren’t culturally central anymore. They’re supplemental content. Marketing material. A thing an artist has to make to check a box, not because the video itself is going to break them into the mainstream.

When was the last time a music video was an event? Beyoncé’s Lemonade visual album in 2016? Childish Gambino’s This Is America in 2018? Those still felt important. But they weren’t breaking on MTV. They were dropping on streaming platforms and social media.

So of course the newspapers didn’t cover MTV’s shutdown because MTV’s been irrelevant to music video culture for years. The story already ended. We just didn’t notice because we were too busy scrolling.

What This Means for Musicians

Here’s where this gets personal for me as a composer.

I don’t make music videos the way pop artists do, but I think about visual representation constantly. My wife was the one that encouraged me to start uploading my concert footage to YouTube (still playing with the algorithm). Some of my pieces are written with the intention of a visual element.  When I write concert music or with contemporary dance, I’m thinking about staging, lighting, how performers move through space.

MTV’s death doesn’t change my day-to-day work. But it does eliminate one more centralized platform where music could be experienced together.

YouTube is infinite and algorithmic. TikTok is bite-sized and chaotic. Vevo exists but who’s really watching Vevo? Music videos have become something you seek out individually, not something you stumble into collectively.

And maybe that’s fine. Maybe that’s just how media works now—fragmented, personalized, on-demand.

But I do think we’ve lost something. Call it communal discovery. Call it cultural cohesion. Call it whatever. It’s gone.

So What Now?

Honestly? I don’t know.

YouTube’s algorithm isn’t changing. TikTok’s format isn’t built for full-length music videos. Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts favor 30-second clips. There’s no centralized “place” for music videos anymore, and there probably won’t be again.

But I’m not ready to write off the music video as a format. Some artists are still making incredible ones. Bad Omens. Kendrick. Daft Punk. They’re just dropping them directly on YouTube and social media, bypassing any notion of a TV premiere.

Which is fine. That’s where the audience is.

But it does make me wonder: if nobody’s watching music videos communally anymore, are they still culturally important? Or are they just content?

I don’t have the answer. I just know that MTV shut down, barely anyone noticed, and that tells me everything I need to know about where we’re at.

The radio star died in 1981. The video star died on December 31, 2025. We just didn’t bother writing the obituary.