MTV used to rule pop culture. Now it mostly breaks through once a year.

September 26, 2026 3oliver

MTV used to rule pop culture. Now it mostly breaks through once a year.

The network returns to its Music Television roots once a year for the VMAs. How did it get here?

Kelsey Weekman

Fri, September 25, 2026 at 9:37 PM UTC

5 min read

MTV in 2026 looks very different from the MTV of the 1980s. (Photo illustration: Gabriella Turrisi/Yahoo News; photos: Getty Images, Ross Marino/Icon and Image/Getty Images)

MTV, the 45-year-old network and music video pioneer, was once the arbiter of cool. They played all the hottest new songs from some of the biggest stars the country has ever seen: Madonna, David Bowie, Michael Jackson and Prince. They ushered in the era of boy band domination and made a space for teen culture to thrive.

Now, MTV isn’t dead, but it’s more of a nostalgic icon than a network that people turn on to actively watch or listen to music. These days, you’ll find seemingly endless reruns of the 49-season clip show Ridiculousness, which stopped making new episodes in 2025.

Gen X-ers and millennials remember MTV’s former life fondly: They recall rushing home from school to catch Total Request Live. But somewhere between “Thriller” and Jersey Shore, the cable channel shifted its identity away from music entirely — save for one night a year, when they air the Video Music Awards. So what happened?

Here’s Ridiculousness/MTV schedule for the week of 12/06/2020!

Highlights:
The Challenge: Double Agents premieres Wed @ 8p, with special episode airing on Monday at the same time#MTVSchedule2020 #week50 pic.twitter.com/fFRLgvYkLR

— MTV Schedule (@MTVSchedule) December 8, 2020

What was MTV, anyway?

To figure out where the network has gone, we have to look back on what it originally was. From the 1980s to the early 1990s, MTV was at its most culturally influential. It launched in 1981, manufactured to captivate teenagers — an audience advertisers weren’t reaching well.

Then, VJs, or video jockeys, introduced music videos to audiences of millions. Getting your video to play on the network was an honor.

In the book I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution, authors Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum explain that making music videos was once an expensive promotional afterthought; MTV, however, made it one of the most important factors in the industry. A video could make or break a career.

“MTV changed the architecture of being an artist,” Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo, whose racy video for “Whip It” dominated the network in its early days, says in the book. (In a true sign of the times, Mothersbaugh collaborated on the theme song for Ridiculousness, which is a cover of Devo’s “Uncontrollable Urge.”)

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It was a massive force of monoculture, uniting audiences around the same songs — something nearly unfathomable now that the algorithms powering streaming services tailor what we listen to to our precise tastes.

When did MTV lose the music?

The reality of differing tastes was a problem MTV quickly encountered. Executives realized that if fans don’t like what’s playing, they’ll change the channel. That means they might not come back, and their value to advertisers could be lost. They started testing different programming, including the 1987 game show Remote Control, but what really hit was 1992’s The Real World. The show, which filmed a group of strangers living together, laid the groundwork for modern reality TV.

1993’s raunchy animated series Beavis and Butt-Head and 2006’s soapy reality program The Hills (a spinoff of the buzzy high school drama Laguna Beach) followed, and MTV became known for more than just music. People said they missed the videos, but did they really, since they were tuning in now more than ever? MTV’s most popular show came in 2009 with Jersey Shore, the raucous reality show about hard-partying pals, which ran for six seasons. Its most-watched VMAs were in 2011.

In 2010, MTV dropped the words “Music Television” from the bottom of its iconic logo, signaling that it had entered a new era. Music videos were relegated to spinoff cable channels like MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live. YouTube had emerged as an on-demand music video streaming platform, so there was no need to endure all the friction of waiting to see an artist you like appear on your television.

What has MTV become?

With cord-cutting and the rise of streaming services, MTV just couldn’t hang, slowly cutting its shows and losing its hold in the youth-driven reality programming space. Parent company Paramount Skydance shut down MTV’s U.K. music-only channels at the end of 2025, and rumors began to spread that the network was entirely dead. It’s not! We still have reruns of Ridiculousness, and of course, the 2026 VMAs.

“Nobody is saying MTV is what it was when you were 15. But it is still on the air, it is still profitable,” former VJ Dave Holmes wrote in Esquire earlier this year.

And the VMAs are still culturally relevant. The 2025 show was its most-watched since 2019 — but that’s also because it was simulcast on fellow Paramount network CBS for the first time. Even so, it’s an indication that people still want to know what the kids are into musically these days. The nominations for this year’s awards suggest MTV would like us to think that’s Madonna, but also newer names like Sienna Spiro, Olivia Dean and (of course) Ella Langley.

MTV still programs some music video channels in the U.S., including “MTV Classic” (which plays music videos from the 1980s to 2000s), “MTV Live” (which runs current music videos) and a collection of MTV-branded FAST channels streaming on Pluto like “MTV Biggest Pop,” “MTV Spankin’ New,” “Yo! MTV” and “MTV Flow Latino.”

But MTV, or any other TV network, likely won’t be able to run on music alone. According to MIDiA Research, 16- to 24-year-olds discover music mostly through TikTok, then YouTube. You can also replicate the MTV VJ experience in your own home by hosting “Gay Guy Music Video Night,” a queer party pregame phenomenon in which a friend group queues up pop videos to watch and talk over before heading out. When people get nostalgic about the MTV they grew up with, it’s not because they’re mourning a steady stream of music videos. It’s not the Music Television that people miss, but the way things used to be, when culture was united.

Video may have killed the radio star — which, by the way, was both the first and last music video played on MTV proper — but algorithms killed the video star.