MTV kick-started a new era of music and pop culture in 1981, when it went on air for the first time, emblematically playing “Video Killed the Radio Star” as its debut music video.
More than four decades later, the channel, now owned by US media giant Paramount Skydance, will wind down its international music broadcasting by the end of the year as it struggles to compete with online streaming and social media.
MTV Music, MTV Hits and its 80s and 90s music shows will be shut down in the UK and other European countries in the coming months, sources at Paramount confirmed to AFP.
These music channels will stop broadcasting at the end of the year in France, Germany, Poland, Australia and Brazil as well, according to various media reports.
It has been declared the “end of an era” by dismayed fans and former MTV video jockeys, the beloved music presenters known as VJs who appeared on millions of screens at the the height of the network’s popularity.
However, the conditions that made MTV “revolutionary” simply “don’t exist anymore”, said Kirsty Fairclough, a professor of screen studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.
The rise of digital streaming platforms like YouTube and TikTok has “completely refigured how we engage with music and images”, the researcher on popular culture told AFP.
Viewers or listeners now expect “immediacy” and “interactivity” that sitting in front of the television to watch rolling music videos cannot provide, she added.
James Hyman, who directed and produced MTV Europe’s dance music shows in the 1990s, agrees the network thrived before the internet was ubiquitous.
“It was so exciting, because that’s mainly all people had,” Hyman told AFP.
– ‘Experimentation’ –
Hyman was at the heart of MTV’s Party Zone — which celebrated dance and club culture and played up-and-coming techno, house and trance music — alongside MTV VJ Simone Angel.
Both of them left the network when MTV Europe split up into regional subsidiaries and pivoted from music programming to reality shows in the early 2000s.