MTV pulls the plug on its music channels

After four decades of feeding generations their first fix of Madonna, Nirvana, and the entire mid-2000s emo scene, MTV is turning down the volume—again. Paramount Global has announced that several of MTV’s music-only channels (think MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV, MTV Live) will go dark by the end of 2025. The main channel, of course, isn’t going anywhere, just don’t expect to find much actual music there.

MTV once revolutionised music television; now it’s the algorithm’s turn to remix the future

It’s poetic, really. MTV, the channel that once killed the radio star, is now being faded out by YouTube, TikTok, and the streaming algorithm gods. Now nobody will wait for a VJ to drop the latest track when you can summon it in a millisecond with a voice command. The medium MTV invented was the visual hit of music video culture. That has mutated into something much more democratised, less curated, and, let’s be honest, far more chaotic.

This move is part of Paramount’s $500 million global cost-cutting plan, a symbolic clean-up of a cultural relic. For the longest, MTV has been a brand searching for its own pulse, surviving on a jumble of nostalgia and reality TV. The Real World and Jersey Shore may have kept it breathing, but the music died long before the plug was pulled.

Still, writing MTV’s obituary feels wrong. The name isn’t disappearing; it’s just shapeshifting again—into social media, digital streaming, and whatever passes for “youth culture” in the 2020s. It’s Darwinism with better lighting.

For those of us who grew up watching “TRL” countdowns or late-night MTV Unplugged sessions, the news lands like a soft heartbreak. But maybe this is how all revolutions end: not with a bang, but with a quiet rebrand.

If MTV debuted today, it’d be a TikTok account and it’d probably still find a way to go viral.

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