MTV Dies in the UK
The channel that once defined youth culture outlived its purpose long ago - but we still feel its loss.
MTV will cease broadcasting its music channels in the UK as of December 31st 2025.
It would be silly to be shocked. Nobody watches it. And honestly, I’m not sure I ever did watch MTV.
Maybe once every four years I’d be flicking through the channels, hear a song I liked and stick around for fifteen minutes. But it was not a regular occurrence.
Even so, MTV was a part of the culture. “MTV Unplugged” was such a treat back in the day. You thought you knew Oasis, but then Noel Gallagher sat down and did an acoustic set and you were blown away by his brilliance. Even The Corrs did an MTV Unplugged and it was fantastic. Bands came alive by appearing on the show and breaking their songs down to the bare essentials.
Rod Stewart’s unplugged set is genius and I honestly think it’s one of the greatest live albums of all time.
The legend of MTV, it’s place in the culture, is what makes it important. Something can exist in our heads as crucial even though, honestly, it no longer plays a part in our current lives. MTV continued, in the background, and there was comfort in knowing it was there -- like some aging relative who lives in a faraway town who never seems to actually die. That was MTV, and now it’s ending.
Their reality TV channel is, for the time being, going to survive. And for younger people today - if they do know MTV - it’s probably because they watched ‘Catfish’. But even that show is now canceled and who knows how long the channel will last.
As for the music channels, it’s amazing they lasted as long as they did. Music Videos have been irrelevant for some time now. If a song is three minutes long, who has the attention span to watch the accompanying video? Years ago the music video was a great place for talented filmmakers to show their cinematic vision. But now if you want your song to hit, you’ve gotta get on a Spotify playlist or even better, you’ve got to go viral on TikTok.
But you don’t go viral for having a good music video. You go viral because 10 seconds of your song catches the public’s imagination and gets reused in hundreds of thousands of videos. That’s how I discovered Olivia Dean, someone was lip syncing to one of her tracks and I thought she sounded amazing.
MTV was once central to the culture. Their audience was young, full of energy, and music was king.
In recent decades, they jumped the shark. Moved from music to reality TV as the core focus. They did it because they had to find a way to survive.
MTV has, in its modern state, been irrelevant for a long time. Yet, you still think someone is kind of cool if you see them in an MTV shirt. They’re not wearing it because they watch ‘Catfish’. They wear it because MTV meant something. Because there was a time when we all came together because we loved music.