Cheers to MTV for more than 40 years of music, videos, and pop culture
When MTV played ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ for the last time, it quietly closed a loop that had been open since 1981.
The irony has always been obvious. The song that launched MTV warned of new media overtaking the old, and for more than four decades, MTV embodied that shift.
It changed how pop culture functioned. Artists were in equal parts heard, seen, styled and packaged. Image became very much inseparable from sound.
For anyone who grew up with MTV on in the background, it was the holy grail of culture, less a TV channel and more like a reference point. It influenced how people dressed, who they paid attention to, and what success looked like.
From Madonna’s provocation to Nirvana’s detachment, MTV reflected culture and pushed certain moments into the mainstream.
The decline, though, has been gradual. Music videos never disappeared; they just moved elsewhere. YouTube, TikTok and social platforms reshaped how clips were made and consumed – shorter, faster, designed for scrolling rather than sitting. MTV, once at the heart of that exchange, slowly slipped to the side.
Radio survived. Music videos survived. MTV just stopped being the primary place where pop culture gathered.
What’s left is the legacy: a reminder that culture needs platforms, and that those platforms change.
Ending the music-only channels with ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ is by no means the death of music television, its a passing of the torch, and a straight up acknowledgement of that shift.
It’s a nod to the idea that every cultural moment has a lifespan, and that the next one is already taking shape elsewhere.