MTV Music Channels

» see mtv.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

five linear music-video channels died together on 31 december 2025. mtv music, mtv 80s, mtv 90s, club mtv, mtv live. paramount let the distribution contracts expire across the uk and europe, and on new year's eve they all went dark in the same window. the flagship mtv channel lives on, but it shows reality television. the promise the brand was founded on in august 1981 is gone.

mtv music in the uk launched on 1 february 2011 as a 24/7 video stream in hd, replacing mtv shows. it was the last serious attempt by paramount's european arm to keep an always-on music-video channel running. around it sat the decade-coded siblings mtv 80s and mtv 90s, plus club mtv for dance and mtv live for concerts. for a long stretch of the 2010s these five sat next to each other on sky and virgin media as the pay-tv music-video bookend to youtube.

mtv the channel started in the us on 1 august 1981 with the buggles' "video killed the radio star". forty-four years later, the same song closed mtv music on the british feed before the channel cut out for the last time. mtv 80s signed off with philip oakey and giorgio moroder's "together in electric dreams". mtv 90s went out on spice girls' "goodbye". paramount did not announce the closures with much ceremony. they were a line item in the post-skydance-merger cost-cutting wave.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

mtv as a brand was the cable-tv answer to "how do you discover new music" between 1981 and the mid-2000s. you watched the channel until they played the video for the song you liked, then you wrote the song down. by the time the specialist 80s and 90s channels launched, that whole model had already been replaced by youtube and spotify. the specialist channels were a nostalgia product, aimed at people who wanted decade-coded music tv as background instead of as discovery.

~ what killed them ~

distribution contracts. sky and virgin media in the uk pay paramount carriage fees to put channels on their platforms, and those fees only make sense at certain viewership levels. linear music-video viewership in 2025 was a fraction of what it was in 2005, and the carriage math stopped working. paramount and skydance had just finished merging in the second half of 2025 and were trimming linear-channel costs across the portfolio. the five music channels were near the front of the queue.

~ honest distance ~

i grew up with mtv as the cable music-video channel in the late 1990s. mtv europe was the version that reached turkey at the time, broadcasting from london with a vj-led playlist that translated reasonably well across languages. the post-2010 specialist split into mtv music plus four decade channels was a uk and european pay-tv product. i was not on sky or virgin media in ankara. these particular five channels died in a part of the carriage market i was never inside. the promise they were honoring is the one i watched as a teenager, and the obit is for that promise.

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