Forty-four years later, on December 31st 2025, MTV's five music-dedicated channels were shut down, marked with that same very song, the irony being that this time, it is the death of linear music video broadcasting that is being commemorated. 

Whilst the flagship MTV channel remains on-air, it has only broadcast reality TV programmes since 2011 (due to them generating more revenue), leaving music to MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live, all of which are now closed across various territories including the UK, Europe, Australia, and Brazil as a part of a restructuring by Paramount. As a result, MTV, in spite of its name, is no longer broadcasting music videos; the brand will still exist but is pivoting toward digital-first entertainment.

The past forty-four years have seen a plethora of iconic and memorable music moments for MTV, from 1985’s sixteen-hour broadcast of Live Aid to groundbreaking performances at the MTV Video Music Awards.

MTV was the centre of music discovery and for artists, exposure. It allowed emerging artists to gain widespread recognition and helped to launch the careers of the likes of Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Duran Duran. 

This shutdown marks the end of an era for music broadcasting; however, for many, including Hannah Diamond, this comes as no surprise, as “it hasn’t been part of the conversation for such a long time”. A channel which was once a centralised hotspot for music publicity and the first place to catch a new music video is now hardly considered when publishing music. Instead, platforms like YouTube have been much more relevant for the past two decades, and even then, there is hardly any money in video releases now, when they require huge budgets only to be overlooked by many consumers and reap little reward. 

This exposes a wider issue in the music industry today, where it is difficult for artists to earn sufficient income for their music when streaming platforms pay them so little for each listen or view, leaving concerts, physical releases and merchandise as their only source of revenue, which have consequently become more unaffordable than ever. The closure indicates a concerning downfall for the era of the music video, but also the completion of a wider cultural change in media habits away from analogue entertainment and toward the internet and streaming, which will ring alarm bells for a lot of broadcasters and musicians.

With shows like Top of the Pops being cancelled in the early 2000s, music’s presence on the TV screen has since been in rapid decline. Where fans once sat down religiously for the weekly charts, or for the release of a new video, they now predominantly find this information online, and there is a sense that music perhaps no longer holds the same prized place in modern culture. Who needs to watch TV for music when they have an endless pocket-sized discography of media constantly at their fingertips to browse as and when they please? While the radio remains a fantastic place for music, few young people today regularly listen to it.

Part of MTV was the communal experience of discovering music, whether it be in the living room with family and friends or as part of a wider society. There is something special about experiencing music with others, or watching a performance at the same time as the rest of the country. Streaming services and social media sites, YouTube, Spotify and TikTok are great for platforming music and making it accessible, but this algorithmic, on-demand service, where feeds are curated to the individual, means that discovering music you might not have already chosen is becoming a rare experience. Having so much choice in one place is brilliant, but one of the best things about live TV is letting what is on surprise you. Not many pop fans today will find themselves headbanging to hair-metal on an unsuspecting Sunday.

Discovery of this kind traversed continents and oceans, not just living rooms. Former MTV VJ Simone Angel, speaking to BBC News, quoted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev about the channel’s cultural impact, who claimed “music achieved more than missiles”. According to him, music gave young people in communist countries in the 1980s an insight into a life and culture that they hadn’t seen before, without propaganda. The broadcasting of music and videos thus transcends cultural and political boundaries. Angel believes there is still a place on TV for music.