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MTV Officially Shutters Its 24-Hour Music Channels

Tyler Jenke

After close to 45 years of broadcasting music, MTV has put its 24-hour music offerings out to pasture.

MTV
MTV(Source: Supplied)

After almost 45 years on the air, MTV has officially shut down its 24-hour music broadcasting channels.

News of the closure was first announced back in October, with the BBC reporting that the channels MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV, and MTV Live would all cease broadcasting on December 31st.

Though no spokesperson would comment on the news, the decision by parent company Paramount was to also affect Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungry, Ireland, Poland, and – of course – Australia.

Now, the likes of Deadline have reported that the end of a musical era came to a head at the finale of 2025, with the station fittingly closing with The Buggles’ Video Killed The Radio Star – the same song which famously opened the station back on August 1st, 1981.

Footage of the event shows The Buggles’ song closing with a station ID and a scrolling message that the channel “is now closed”.

MTV first opened its doors in the middle of 1981, with the brand making its way over to Australia in 1987 for a six-year late-night weekend run on the Nine Network. Throughout the ‘80s, it became a crucial touchpoint for music lovers around the world, with its vast musical offering allowing the discovery of new artists and songs to reach unprecedented new heights.

The local MTV Australia channel was launched in 1996, and remained on the air until 2023, when it switched to the international feed. “Our MTV music channels have moved to a global feed that features the best music from around the world,” a spokesperson said at the time.

However, this slow exit for MTV was something that had been predicted for years. Most notably, SR-71’s song 1985 (later covered and made famous by Bowling For Soup) lamented how the titular year featured “music still on MTV.”

In the ensuing decades, MTV slowly moved away from its groundbreaking, influential music programming and instead focused on reality TV and original programming.

While it wasn’t up to the same standard that music programs such as Total Request Live or MTV Unplugged provided, much of this original programming became incredibly popular, with shows such as Jersey Shore, Catfish, Punk'd becoming staples of 21st century viewing.

In recent years though, the channel's move to original programming became something of a joke amongst former viewers, with a 2020 report from Variety noting how the station's 2011 clip show series Ridiculousness made up 113 hours of the normal 168-hour week.

This nascent axing of music on MTV comes about following a massive merger between Paramount and Skydance Media back in August, with cost-cutting measures swiftly taking place in the immediate aftermath.

While it remains to be seen what the future will look like for music on television (thankfully, staples such as Australia’s own Rage are – touch wood – safe from external forces), it goes without saying that a world without music on MTV is a true end of an era, with streaming platforms and sites such as YouTube likely to continue their monopolisation of the medium going forward.