The music video era as we knew it is quietly slipping away

18 October 2025

From left: Quincy Jones, Madonna, Herbie Hancock, Cyndi Lauper, Billy Idol and Tina Turner Illustration by Barbara Gibson

The pulse of music video culture may be slowing to a whisper as MTV prepares to pull the plug on its five UK-based music channels at the end of 2025, raising a very real question about the future of the genre itself.

When MTV burst onto the scene in 1981, it rewrote how artists were discovered, songs were promoted and pop culture was consumed. The network’s 24-hour diet of music videos empowered image, sound and spectacle to collide and create new icons from Michael Jackson’s moonwalk to Madonna’s bold reinventions.

Now the parent company, Paramount Global, has announced that MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live will all cease broadcasting by 31 December. The brand’s flagship channel will remain but will focus on reality programming rather than music videos.

For many the decision signals the end of an era. Music directors and producers are watching the effects with cautious reflection. At companies like Academy Films which once helped launch filmmakers via high-budget videos the question is less about mourning the decline of MTV and more about what legacy remains for the music video format. “Labels aren’t as willing to invest heavily in videos as they once were,” says Jennifer Byrne, head of development.

London-based director Iris Luz echoes the sentiment from the production side. She notes budgets are shrinking rapidly, even when the ideas seem simple. In her example a video shot in a house with four people gets pitched as “50 billion pounds” she says. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

The logic is persuasive. Music marketing has splintered: once a single three-minute video aimed at MTV’s output was enough, whereas now artists must consider TikTok clips, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts and varying formats across platforms. The video is increasingly a branding tool rather than a marquee event. Luz calls today’s output “vehicles for relatability and branding that make [a viewer] want to buy into the artist.”

Independent artists face even sharper challenges. Hannah Diamond, who has worked in the scene for years, points out that you have to be well-backed by a label before you even get the budget to make a music video. “Unless they think it’s going to be a worthwhile investment,” she says. “That era is behind us.”

But perhaps most intriguingly the claim that “no one makes money from them anymore” echoes throughout the article. Directors note that even when videos go viral they rarely translate into direct profit-centres; they are stepping stones or portfolio pieces rather than high-return commercial endeavours. The industry is grappling with how to monetise a format that once stood at its centre but now lies on the periphery.

Still the video isn’t dead, it’s evolving. Many directors believe the form will persist in some shape (like the album or vinyl record) because music needs visual expression. As Byrne notes: “Music videos still allow those unique personalities to shine through and take risks.” The question however is what that form will look like and who will fund it.

When MTV cut its teeth on launching stars, the music video was a cultural landmark. Now it is a quiet fixture in a broader content ecosystem. Platforms like YouTube and TikTok dominate the distribution. For many independent artists the video release lives on their own websites or on socials; traditional networks no longer matter.

In the end the article asks us to consider not simply whether music videos are “under threat,” but what place they will occupy in the next chapter of pop culture. Will they again be spectacle, budgeted, broadcast and eventised? Or will they remain short-form, dispersed across platforms, functional rather than landmark? The loss of MTV’s dedicated channels may mark the tipping point.