The rise and fall of MTV

On January 1st, 2026, MTV officially stopped playing music. This was the TV channel that made Michael Jackson famous, made Madonna a thing, and defined culture for less than a couple of generations. For many of us, including you, I think it's worth thinking about what killed the channel. Was it generational change? Was it technology? Well, hold that thought. We'll figure it out.

Oh, and by the way, thanks to Mint Mobile for sponsoring this video. More on them later.

Well, back in 1983, the president of CBS Records, picked up the phone and called the head of MTV at the time to make what was perhaps the most important phone call in the history of the network. Walter Yannikoff was the head of CBS Records, and, uh, across America, every single radio station was playing Michael Jackson's Billie Jean. It's the top song in America, yet MTV refused to play it. Yannikoff told MTV that they either needed to play the Billie Jean video or he was going to pull every record that that CBS had off of MTV, let them refuse to play it. And then he was gonna go public and tell them that MTV was refusing to play music that was produced by a Black guy. CBS Records at the time had Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, The Clash. They were a quarter of the music that MTV was playing. MTV made the smart business decision. They caved and they started playing Michael Jackson. And doing that, well, it propelled him to basically be a music god, one of the icons of the 1980s, '90s, and beyond. But just 43 years later, the brand of MTV is nothing like it was, well, before. Uh, out of every 168 hours a week that they play content, 113 of that is spent playing a show called Ridiculousness, a far throw from music. So how did we go so far from what was a driver of the culture of America to something that's basically irrelevant now on MTV? That's what this video is about. To explain how it happened, let's go back to the beginning. In 1979, a young Warner Brothers music executive, a guy named Robert Pittman, who was a former radio DJ by the way, pitched other executives there on the concept of doing a 24-hour music video only TV station and call it MTV. Today that seems like a pretty reasonable bet to do. We see what happened eventually with cable TV and the internet and all that kind of stuff, but back then cable TV was a pretty new thing. it only reached about 17 million households, and most Americans had never even seen a music video. And as you can see with my video about ESPN, how they got started around the same time, a lot of times the people that make a lot of money are the ones that see where the future is going and make bets that it happens. And that's what these guys did. On August 1st, 1981, MTV had its first broadcast, and the first words that were said were, "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll." The first video was a song by the Buggles called "Video Killed the Radio Star," which was actually kind of prophetic. That first year, MTV only reached about 800,000 subscribers, most of them in New Jersey. And the on-air hosts called VJs—video jockeys, get it? A play on DJs—they were only paid $25,000 to $30,000 a year and told by management, "Hey, we're not sure if the company's gonna make it, so we recommend you do not buy houses or put down roots here." And to show you how bad that early product was, early on they only had 125 videos in rotation. The idea of the music video wasn't a thing. People were still slinging, you know, cassette tapes and records. So the idea of somebody making music video, well, just wasn't there. So there weren't that many of them. They only had 125. So things were stale quickly. In the first year, Warner Amex, the owner of MTV, they lost $50 million. And you can imagine what things were like inside the boardroom at that point. I mean, if you lose $50 million out the gate, something like that, good chance you're going to throw in the towel quickly. And they threatened to pull the plug. But there was a bigger problem early on back then, which was MTV didn't want to play Black artists. They weren't doing it. In 1983, David Bowie went on the air and he actually confronted one of the DJs, the VJs, Mark Goodman, about it and asked, why are there so few Black artists being played on MTV? MTV's answer was that the rock format didn't fit Black artists. It was a flimsy answer at best. Which brings us back to the call I told you about at the beginning, the one from Walter Yannikoff of CBS Records. And that was then in March 1983, when the video for Billie Jean by Michael Jackson went into heavy rotation. It was the first video by a Black artist to do that. It propelled MTV to, well, be relevant to people. It was playing the hits and what people wanted to see. And it actually created the very first profitable quarter that MTV would have. Then came something special that would change everything, and that was the music video for Thriller. If you remember this music video, it was like almost like a mini movie around the song, and it cost Michael Jackson and his team $900,000 to produce. But after it appeared, suddenly Michael Jackson was selling a million records per week, and he took basically MTV and had transformed the entire thing from being an afterthought to a cultural touchstone. But here's the thing about legends like this. Sometimes they're not what they seem. And let's come back to that later. They'll prove important in this story. MTV exploded by 1984. It topped all other cable channels in revenue. If you wanted to reach young consumers, this was the way to do it. MTV net revenue went from $71 million in 1984 to grow by 50% to 1986, over $111 million. You had young people because of the I Want My MTV campaign. Calling cable systems and demanding that MTV was brought to their homes and towns. In 1985, media giant Viacom brought the MTV network for $667 million. Real money back then. By 1992, MTV would reach 112 million homes worldwide and do over $400 million in revenue. And get this, profit margins on that revenue would be 40 to 41%, and it would be growing 25% year over year. Perhaps one of the best businesses in history. MTV became so dominant that it just didn't print money. It also changed culture and created stars. Folks like Bon Jovi, Madonna, Michael Jackson. They are all because of what happened with MTV. Back then we had the monoculture. Like, you wanted to get music, you wanted to see the latest. Well, you could either go to the record store and hope some guy with a weird neckbeard would explain it to you there, or do like your friends did and look on MTV every night and see what songs were playing. But this is where things get interesting. Remember the monoculture? It wouldn't last forever.

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But there was fundamentally a big problem with MTV. They actually never made much money from playing music. Remember back earlier in this video how they had lost $50 million in the early days? Even though the, like, the content was free and the videos were paid for by the record labels and the artists themselves, it turned out showing people music videos didn't really keep them that glued to the screen. MTV figured this out early. In 1987, they had actually done one of the first game shows targeting young people and original content on MTV via a show called Remote Control. It was actually hugely more popular than the music videos. And from a more important standpoint, you could sell ads on it because people would watch the whole show. In May 1992, the same year that everybody remembers as MTV's, you know, peak of revenue and cultural relevance, they launched a show called The Real World, one of the first reality shows. That show got 3 times higher ratings than playing music videos did for MTV. And they discovered the magic of reality TV, which would be the beginning of a trend that would happen over the next couple of decades. Reality TV was much easier and cheaper to produce than scripted stuff. In fact, like $1 million per episode, which is basically nothing for a network like MTV. Money matters. From 1995 to 2000, MTV slashed the amount of music they were playing by nearly two-thirds. They were down to just playing about 8 hours of music per day by the end of the decade. Beavis and Butt-Head would get 3 million viewers per episode, but even better than that, The Real World would get 3.5 million. Consumers— and I remember me at this time as well— started to complain. If it's called music television, where's the music? Well, it turned out that we complained we didn't get to watch music there, but in reality, we would all click on watching Beavis and Butt-Head, The Real World, and other custom shows. But it turns out the real story behind all that was even a bit crazier. In September of 1998, MTV had launched a show called Total Request Live hosted by Carson Daly, who my younger viewers may know as kind of an older host. But back then he was a young guy. He hadn't gotten old yet. The idea was to do a live show where the artists would come in in the after-school hours and basically do a music kind of live variety show. And when they launched it, fans packed Times Square outside of the studios. It became must-see TV and it would get 700,000 to 800,000 viewers per episode. But what nobody really talked about at the time was Total Request Live, a show centered around music and the artists would only get like a quarter of the viewers that The Real World or Beavis and Butt-Head would get. In 1999, profits soared 85% at media giant and owner Viacom, mostly due to double-digit growth at MTV. But contrary to public belief, it wasn't music that was doing it. It was all this other stuff. In the early 2000s, Napster and Kazaa and all that stuff would launch, making music even easier to get without paying for it. And then in 2005, YouTube launched and suddenly music was freely available on demand without having to wait for some DJ to play it for you. So MTV's remaining value proposition around music, well, it basically evaporated overnight. They were basically offering a worse product than all the other options. And so MTV did what you kind of expect them to do. They doubled down on what would work. In 2002, they launched The Osbournes with Ozzy Osbourne and Sharon. They followed with shows like Laguna Beach and a bunch of other kind of just reality stuff. Then in 2009, they launched one of my favorite shows of all time, The Jersey Shore. By its 2011 peak, the Jersey Shore TV show drew 11 million viewers. This is more than any other MTV show basically in history of the network. It was so popular that it drove more profit growth for media conglomerate owner Viacom than any other product that they owned, including Blockbuster. One of my favorite things about the Jersey Shore phenomenon was when Viacom and MTV tried to replace it, the kind of the actors that were in it with new people. And it didn't work. And it was kind of one of the magical things you learn about media and when media property works, this magical combination of format and the people that are in it that makes it work. You change just one thing, it doesn't work anymore. And that's what the Jersey Shore proved. And man, Snooki and those guys, I was a fan. Still am. By 2011, MTV would reach its peak, 99 million households. But this was the beginning of the end, not because MTV had abandoned music or gotten into reality TV, The reality was its viewers were about to abandon cable and TV entirely. 2010 would be the peak era of cable TV subscriptions in the United States. The 18-49 demographic that MTV relied upon so much, they would start moving to online and on-demand— YouTube, Netflix, and all that kind of stuff. And when the Jersey Shore ended in the early 2010s, nothing replaced it for the network. And so viewership cratered by over 50% among its core demographic. Revenue cratered by 17%. In 2011, basically MTV started to run a show hosted by a guy named Rob Dyrdek called Ridiculousness, and it was a clip show. It was easy to produce and super cheap. What happened next would be almost comical. Instead of trying to find the next Jersey Shore or original content that would be compelling like other networks did, HBO comes to mind, they just started to run Ridiculousness. Well, a ridiculous amount over and over. By 2020, Ridiculousness would be 2/3 of the hours that MTV would be broadcasting each day. That's 113 out of 168 hours. Dyrdek did well. He supposedly got paid $32 million a year during the run, but he recorded 46 seasons of Ridiculousness, over 1,700 episodes. Like an Iron Man. Viacom's excuse for this was that their audience was becoming much and much more nostalgic. And they wanted to see stuff that they were familiar with. So they just gave the people what they want. Meanwhile, their core kind of coveted youth audience, the one advertisers really want to talk to, they were leaving. And when companies go on a revenue decline like this towards the end of their lifespan, they start to just cut as much as they can to stay profitable. And they did that over and over again with multiple different things they had. In 2023, MTV News, the news about, you know, culture and media, and music showed that they'd had. It shuttered after several decades. MTV's watched most program each year, their Super Bowl, the Video Music Awards, basically the Oscars for music, used to get nearly 12 million viewers back in the early 2000s. By 2024, it would just get a fraction of that, just a few million. And the only way they got that many was by broadcasting the VMAs basically across every channel that Viacom owned, 13 of them in fact, in 2024. In 2024, MTV ranked 55th out of 153 national cable channels, just to show you the ridiculousness of how far they'd fallen. MTV, suddenly owned by a new conglomerate called Skydance, Ridiculousness was finally canceled a few months ago in October 2025. On January 1st, 2026, all the dedicated music channels, MTV One, MTV Two, MTV After Dark, well, they all went dark and MTV stopped playing music. And as a nostalgic Gen X myself, this makes me kind of sad. I mean, I remember getting into Public Enemy because of watching Yo! MTV Raps or staying up late to try to see some of the edgier stuff that was on there just because back then, like, there was no way to find it unless you found it on MTV. And today all that's gone, replaced by the internet and a bunch of mistakes. And as cable keeps dying, MTV is dying along with it. Whereas they used to hit over 100 million households, now cable penetration is dropping precipitously. Barely 37% of U.S. households have access to MTV directly. And the people that are on cable, they're not the people that MTV and advertisers want to talk to. They're a bunch of old folks. The average age of folks subscribing for cable, well, they're Fox News viewers. They're not the folks watching this stuff. So you have to ask, did MTV actually fail? The conventional story is that MTV abandoned music and lost its soul. But the data really shows a different story. MTV was actually a channel that lost money. On playing music. Where it made money was on original content and programming targeting youths. In 1992, its supposedly golden era, man, it made all its money from reality TV. And its most profitable years, well, those are the Jersey Shore years. In reality, MTV kind of died because it gave the audience what they wanted. They said they wanted music, but in reality, they tuned in for reality TV. When cable died and the monoculture died, suddenly the monopoly that MTV had on being able to broadcast and make stars and, uh, be reaching into all of our homes. That ended with it. And, uh, here we are today, MTV dying a slow death. In reality, the idea that the internet by itself killed MTV, uh, well, it seems like the story is a lot more complex than that. So let me know what you think and why MTV died a slow and fast death, depending on how you look at it, in the comments below. We'll catch you next time. And let me know what you think about this video. I try to read all your comments. See you next time.