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Journalism of Courage
After four decades on air, MTV, the music television network that once defined the way the world listened to and watched music, besides being the definition of what stood for cultural cool, is set to bid farewell by the end of the year.
Earlier this week, Paramount Global, MTV’s parent company, announced that its music channels MTV 80s, MTV Music, Club MTV, MTV 90s, and MTV Live will shut down worldwide by December 31, 2025. The shutdowns will begin in the UK and Ireland, followed by the rest of Europe, Brazil, France and Poland, and then Asia.
The only channel that will remain on air is MTV HD, known for its reality shows and entertainment programming.
On August 1, 1981, when John Lack brought MTV to life with the words, “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll”, one didn’t anticipate the lasting effect it would have on popular culture.
The announcement was followed by ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, a synth pop track by the British outfit The Buggles, which became the first music video that played on the channel after it began broadcasting in the US at 12:01 AM. The song was a prophecy of sorts.
Now, a singer wasn’t someone you just heard. Michael Jackson was moonwalking in Thriller, presenting cinematic storytelling. Then there was the angst of Nirvana, the power of Whitney Houston and the bold defiance of Madonna, whose stylistic identity combined with her music earned her the moniker ‘Queen of pop’. Soon, MTV began to carry a lot of cultural weight.
One of the simplest answers to this question is that hardly anyone is watching. For an audience for whom music discovery has begun to mean on-demand music videos with dependence on YouTube, TikTok, and Spotify, MTV does not feature as a choice anymore.
According to a report by Nielsen, in the US, MTV’s average prime-time audience of 256,000 people in 2023 was down from 807,000 in 2014. According to UK rating agency Barb, in July 2025, MTV Music only got 1.3 million viewers, a fraction of what it used to attract during its heydays in the 1990s and 2000s.
The advent of Netflix and other OTT platforms also contributed to the change in viewing habits.
Besides this, there are corporate restructuring pressures after Paramount’s Merger with Skydance Media in August 2025, which entails cost-cutting measures of about $500 million worldwide. Paramount Global, which owns CBS, Nickelodeon and Paramount+, is attempting to streamline costs through channels that will give decent revenues. The cutdown will also allow the company to focus on expanding its Paramount+ streaming service.
There was a time when MTV turned unknown names into stars. Now that the concept of discovery is spread across various digital platforms where a bunch of algorithms end up deciding which artist is seen and promoted.
With MTV, it was a more curatorial concept, where great music was discovered due to the decisions and judgement of the broadcaster. Moreover, appearing on MTV meant validation, being listened to by millions at a time.
The digital landscape is divided into many kinds of platforms and while it is democratic, it is also not really a space where everyone would stop in their tracks together to listen to a significant music moment. People would sit for hours for their favourite song to make an experience.
In a world where personalised feeds are the norm, MTV’s shutdown will lose that space of listening to, watching and discovering music together.
The 1990s were an interesting time to be a musician in India. Post liberalisation, the scope of private and foreign investments scaled up, paving the way for the entry of foreign broadcasters such as MTV and Channel V in the country.
MTV came to India in 1996 and gave people a taste of contemporary music from around the world. There was an explosion of choices and a talented bunch of artists grasped it with both hands. While India listened to global pop, MTV also gave a platform to generations of VJs such as Malaika Arora, Nikhil Chinappa, Cyrus Broacha, Shenaz Treasury, Cyrus Sahukar and Mini Mathur, among others, who appealed to English-speaking urban youth, and were the influencers of the time. One discovered pop culture with them.
With Bollywood becoming very limited and closed in terms of its musical choices and only wanting a certain kind of voices, the channel became an opportunity for those who didn’t fit in that box. The channel spawned new fashion trends and got indie pop a lot of recognition.
Musicians like Alisha Chinai, Suneeta Rao, Shweta Shetty, Daler Mehendi, Jasbir Jassi, Falguni Pathak and Bally Sagoo, among others, became household names, in no small part due to MTV.
Currently, MTV India is not focused on music. Rather, its focussed on reality shows such as Splitsvilla and MTV Roadies, whose cultural appeal will allow the channel to survive for now. The channel is licensed by JioStar in India, which hasn’t put out any statement shutting down yet.
