Jan 01, 2026
3 min read
MTV has stopped airing music videos in the UK, artists are now promoting themselves on social media.But does it ever compare to our top video picks?
Outside is old, inside is new.So, goodbye (mostly) to MTV, which stops airing music videos on its five exclusive channels at midnight on New Year's Eve.MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live have been shut down in the UK, with the main channel, MTV HD, limping along but showing reality shows such as Geordie Shore, Naked Dating UK and Ex on the Beach.about popular culture.It's like Julia Roberts doing a panto in Scunthorpe.
I remember being excited when MTV Europe launched in 1987 and moved to the High Water Channel offices in Camden Lock the following year.I need MTV.'
And we really like that - artists for whom MTV has become an important new platform;record labels that spent millions on music videos but more than made it back in sales;and the players who showed the videos and the next new concept: the VJs, the presenters who introduced them.In the beginning it was a pan-European rum mix, from the Anglo-Belgian double act of Ray Cokes and Marcel Vanthilt to the lively German Kristiane Backer, who became one of my first crushes.Then MTV UK appeared in 1997 and welcomed many big names or soon to be big homegrown: Trevor Nelson, Cat Deeley, Zane Lowe, Russell Brand.
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Man, it sounds a little dated, but it was cool in the 80s and 90s.I remember talking to Nelson and watching him record links for his show The Lick in Camden.It was like a place.MTV was available in 10 million homes in the UK and Ireland, and the network's jewel, the MTV Video Music Awards, was watched by 12.4 million people around the world in 2011.
But that era is over, and it's easy to see why: music videos are less important in today's media.Artists can be featured on social media and their fans are automatically notified when new music is released on Spotify and Apple Music.In an age of smartphones and short attention spans, official announcements compete with fan-made praise videos and a host of other on-screen distractions, from instant messages to cat parts falling into trash cans.
If you watch a music video, it will probably be on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, and chances are you won't watch it all the way through.No wonder budgets went from millions to thousands.Many artists, including Billie Eilish and Lily Allen, have gone to cheaper "viewers," short clips that accompany songs on streaming services.
A reasonably fair way to measure the popularity of recent music videos is the number of views on YouTube within the first 24 hours of release.The all-time top ten is dominated by BTS's Butter (108 million) at No. 1, followed by four other BTS songs; 3 Blackpink songs; One for Lisa (a member of Blackpink) and Taylor Swift, the only artist from outside Asia to be at No. 10. All the top ten were released between 2019 and 2022. This can be seen as the last hoorah for the music video in itsformatu classicu.
Since then, the numbers have declined.Swift released only one video to accompany her album The Life of a Showgirl this year: Fate of Ophelia, which was viewed 13 million times in the first 24 hours.That sounds amazing until you compare it to me!(2019), which has been viewed 65 million times.Beyoncé has achieved considerable success with her last two albums, Renaissance and Cowboy Carter, but she made one video, a low-budget effort for Bodyguard released to encourage people to vote in the presidential election in November 2024. That worked well.Even Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican megastar who just broke the title of Spotify's most popular artist Swift, didn't bother making videos to match his latest single.
The music video is not dead, but it has morphed into something rarer and somehow worse.The winner of best video at this year's VMAs was Ariana Grande's Brighter Days Ahead, a 26-minute short film in which Grande played an old woman who erased the memory of a young romance.With a mad scientist, holographic doctors and nurses, and a burning inferno scene, it was crazy and ambitious, but you still long for the glory days of music videos.Here are five of the best.
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Thriller on Michael Jackson (1983)
Directed by John Landis (An American Werewolf in London), this 14-minute epic is still notable for its ambition, the creature trick from Oscar-winning artist Rick Baker, and the zombie training dance.The fact that hordes of New Yorkers recreate the dance every Halloween in the West Village says it all.
After Aha, Take On Me (1984)
His love affair with Morten Harket;Hot Gossip dancer Bunty BaileyDirected by Steve Barron, the Irish-British man behind Jackson's Billie Jean and Dire Straits' Money for Nothing, the video moves between pencil-sketch animation and the real world.It rivaled Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer as the most creative picture of the Eighties.
Madonnas Vogue (1990)
Another humdinger of the future heavyweight of cinema, in this case David "Sam" Fincher.Filmed in artistic black and white and choreographed by New York fashion legends Luis Camacho and Jose Gutierrez, it references Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka and Golden Age Hollywood photographers George Harrell and Horst P. Horst. Also, it features Madge in a lace top that leaves little to the imagination.
Windowlicker von Aphex Twin (1999)
The 1990s were the craziest time to make videos, with Jonathan Glazer directing jaw-dropping footage for Jamiroquai's Virtual Insanity, and France's Michel Gondry pushing the envelope for Björk, Radiohead and the Rolling Stones.This one by British wunderkind Chris Cunningham is the creep: a parody of the hit rap video in which Aphex Twin spins in a very long limousine, his face closed in a grotesque smile.
The Phone by Lady Gaga and Beyoncé (2010)
Gaga was thrown in jail and robbed by a fellow inmate before being released from Kill Bill and driven by Beyoncé to Uma Thurman's Billy Wagon.They won't do that.
