MTV | The channel that made youth culture, now fades into history

From cultural disruptor to nostalgic relic, MTV’s journey traces how relevance is built, sustained, and eventually surrendered.

On 1 August 1981, grainy footage showed an astronaut planting a flag on the Moon and five words changed pop culture forever: ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’. With that symbolic first broadcast, MTV launched a movement. It rewired how music was discovered, how youth expressed identity, how fashion travelled, and how brands learned to speak to a new generation.

Now, after 44 extraordinary years, MTV’s parent company Paramount Global announced the shutdown of its global music channels at the end of 2025, i.e. in a few days. The moment feels less like an ending and more like a reckoning. MTV India, licensed by JioStar, will not shut down, as announced by the channel with a viral post that said, ‘Hum kahin nahi ja rahe.’

Yet the question remains: What happens when the brand that taught the world how to be ‘cool’ can no longer keep pace with the very culture it created? The answer is not an easy one, because MTV’s story is not simply one of decline. It is a masterclass in brand evolution followed by brand inertia.

From music channel to cultural engine

In its earliest avatar, MTV was radical. Before algorithms, before playlists, before streaming, it was the most powerful discovery engine in the world. A single rotation could launch and propel careers. The channel didn’t just reflect youth culture; it manufactured it at scale.

But MTV’s real genius wasn’t just music, it was tone. Irreverent, anarchic, playful, and visually disruptive. The channel spoke with its audience, not at them. Its on-air promos were as influential as its playlists. The brand understood something few did in the early ’90s: that youth culture cannot be centrally controlled, it must feel locally owned.

When global cool learnt to speak desi

When MTV launched in India in 1996, it rapidly Indianised itself, and permanently altered the country’s pop culture ecosystem. MTV India gave us a generation of VJs who were sharply opinionated, sometimes chaotic, always authentic youth icons. From Malaika Arora, Maria Goretti, and Shenaz Treasurywala to Cyrus Broacha and Nikhil Chinappa, they were funny, flawed, experimental, and deeply relatable.

It also created formats that blurred entertainment, rebellion, and aspiration: Roadies redefined reality TV toughness; Splitsvilla reimagined youth romance; Bakra brought prank culture to mainstream television; and MTV Unplugged reintroduced musicality to a generation raised on spectacle.

The slow drift away from music

The first real shift in MTV’s trajectory was strategic, not technological. In the late ’90s, it reduced its dependence on music videos and leaned into reality formats. From a business perspective, it made sense: original IP is more profitable than syndicated music content. But from a brand perspective, something began to fracture.

As reality shows multiplied the emotional bond forged through shared musical discovery slowly thinned. Then came YouTube. Suddenly, discovery moved from appointment viewing to on-demand consumption. Algorithms replaced curators. Bedrooms replaced broadcast studios. By the time Spotify, Apple Music, and Instagram Reels arrived, MTV’s original value proposition ‘we control what you see’, had quietly expired.

MTV did attempt digital reinvention. Social media presence grew. Short-form content appeared. Collaborations multiplied. But the brand remained trapped between two worlds: too legacy to be born-again digital-first, too scattered to remain appointment-led television.

MTV remained a channel, just distributed across more screens. Its identity blurred. Was it still about music? Youth activism? Reality stars? Meme culture? Nostalgia?

In branding, ambiguity is death.

The final years of MTV reveal a truth many heritage brands struggle with: relevance is not inherited; it must be earned repeatedly. Gen Z did not ‘fall out of love’ with MTV. They never truly met it.

What MTV got right (and what it taught us)

Despite its decline, MTV’s brand legacy remains monumental:

- It proved that media could be an identity, not just a content pipeline.

- It taught marketers that tone matters more than polish.

- It demonstrated that localisation is not dilution; it is multiplication.

- It showed that youth brands must be participants, not observers.

MTV changed formats. It changed distribution. But it never fully redefined its reason for existence in a post-broadcast world. MTV shutting down is not merely the death of a channel. It marks the formal end of the broadcast-driven pop culture era. Perhaps most poignantly, it reminds us that the brands that define generations must also know when their generation has passed.

What future brands should learn

MTV’s story should be taught in every brand and media classroom, not as nostalgia but as strategy. Because the lesson is not that ‘digital killed television’. The lesson is this: No brand, however iconic, can outlive the culture it refuses to relearn.

MTV didn’t die because young people stopped loving culture. It faded because culture no longer needed a single loudspeaker. And yet, for 44 years, it held the microphone like no one ever had before.

When the music finally stops, it won’t be a silent ending. It will echo.

Salil Jayakar, is Deputy Director – Marketing and Communications, S P Jain Institute of Management & Research (SPJIMR), is a former journalist and editor. Views are personal.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.