TikTok killed the video star

It is August 1, 1981.
It’s barely a minute after midnight, and the world still sleeps. Nobody knows, but everything is about to change.
First the classic Color Test screen appears on the small screen, then a flash, a rocket taking off, the flag on the Moon and a voice saying: “Ladies and gentlemen, rock’n’roll.”

And so, with that phrase, MTV was born.
The first video clip to be broadcast? “Video Killed The Radio Star” by The Buggles.
A title that seems written by a prophet. A premonition. Why yes: the video was really going to “kill” the radio.

It was the beginning of a new era, one in which the image would take music by the hand and take it into another dimension.
Yes, because MTV wasn’t just a channel: it was a cultural earthquake.
For the first time, the music was visible. It was no longer enough to listen: you had to look, dream, dress, move like your idols.
The Buggles, with their synthetic voice and that sweetly melancholy melody, sang of a future that was already there, on the threshold.

“We knew technology was about to change everything,” Trevor Horn, their frontman, would later say. And he was right. That night, MTV ignited the engine of an entire era.

And how ironic it is that today, 44 years later, another media has arrived to kill the video that killed the radio that killed the vinyl that my father bought at the market.
MTV is dead. Long live the algorithm.

MTV: when three letters were enough to say “cool”

In the following years, MTV became a universal language.
Three letters that meant only one thing: coolness.
From Michael Jackson who transformed “Thriller” into a film, to Live Aid broadcast live for sixteen hours, up to the MTV Video Music Awards, where music was no longer just sound, but spectacle, story, collective ritual.

Every generation has had its MTV: that of non-stop video clips, that of smiling VJs who seemed to be everyone’s friends, that of afternoons spent in front of the TV discovering new artists.

In England, when the British version was born in 1997, the first video broadcast was “Three Lions” by The Lightning Seeds, with comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner as special guests.

It was an era in which even football and music spoke the same language, that of hope and identity, on the eve of the French World Cup.

For nearly forty years, MTV embodied the pop dream: a global arena where artists and audiences met in the same visual space, in front of the same screen.
It was there that myths were built, that icons were born, that fashions exploded.

The slow decline of music on television

But every revolution, sooner or later, is replaced by another.
And just as MTV had supplanted radio, something new, silent and inexorable, was coming.

First YouTube, then Spotify, and finally TikTok.
Three names that need no introduction: they are the new “frequencies” of the connected generation, the one that doesn’t wait for the schedule, but creates its own.
In a few seconds, on a vertical screen, the algorithm decides what to listen to, who to watch, who to become.

And so, on a sad day in October 2025, MTV UK announces the definitive closure of its music channels, in much of Europe (read the details here).

Paramount Media Networks explained the choice in simple but ruthless words: “The rise of YouTube, Spotify and TikTok has reduced demand for traditional music channels.”
The decision has been made: by 31 December 2025, all five MTV music channels will close in most of Europe, namely MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live HD.
To be honest, one will remain, namely MTV HD, which now has nothing of Music Television, being populated solely by reality shows.

It’s the end of linear music programming in Britain.
The end of an era.

“MTV was where it all came together”

There are those who have experienced this end first hand.
Like Simone Angel, one of the network’s historic VJs, who at the BBC he confessed in a faint voice:
“I was sad, a little in disbelief. I knew it would happen, sooner or later. But it breaks my heart. MTV was the place where it all came together.”

There is a poignant sweetness in those words.
Because MTV wasn’t just a TV channel, it was a meeting point.
A place where music still had a body, a face, a gesture.

Today music lives in feeds, in swipes, in hashtags.
And it dies in algorithms and playlists.
And even more distant seems the distant noise of that opening theme, that metallic voice that announced rock’n’roll as if it were the dawn of a new civilization.

Maybe, if we close our eyes and watch “Video Killed The Radio Star“, we can still feel that thrill of that night in 1981.
The take-off, the flash, the voice announcing the future.
Only this time, the future has another name, another face, another rhythm.
And dance on TikTok.

Marco Brunasso is a music journalist and musician. His writing explores the connection between sounds, stories and cultural impact, using storytelling as an approach to criticism and storytelling. He actively collaborates with various sector publications including RockIt, Rockol, Le Rane and TechPrincess, for which he created and edited the column Dentro la Canzone. He is the founder, singer and bassist of the indie-rock project LEHAVRE.