The MTV Music Archive
Non-stop, online music videos, without ads
Powered by:
Use the drop down menu above to slider to select the decade you want to listen to.
View Full Screen Player Version
Over 36k music videos added so far. Press play in the bottom left corner to enjoy the experience.
You can ignore the Buy Me a Coffee popups because I don’t get a coffee. That money goes to the dev who made the playlist and overlays, known as project MTV Rewind.
Everything is ad free and powered by YouTube. Copyright compliance is handled by YouTube.
Do You Want Your MTV?
I Want my MTV
–“Die Straits” – MTV’s biggest ass kisser of all time lol, sang this line in the song above, “Money for Nothing”
The “MTV Music” channel, the one that actually still played music videos, officially went dark, internationally on Dec 31, 2025.
This page helps to preserve some of that culture, along with the help of a clever indie rebel music loving dev on Twitter/X @flexasaurusrex who helped code the YouTube playlist player above.
About MTV
MTV Music was the pulse of the youth for many decades, until young people got distracted with random average people doing lame dances on TikTok to 10 second clips of songs, instead of high quality choreography over three and half minute songs.
While they were distracted… MTV Music went away, since all the music videos are on YouTube anyway.
But there is something magical about a song automatically playing, that you might not have otherwise chosen to listen to.
Why Save MTV?
You might think this is not needed. Everything is on YouTube anyway.
Yes… but YouTube has algorithms, which try to predict what you will like based on what you’ve heard and liked before.
This just results in you hearing more of the same genres and types of songs that you already like.
You often end up missing out on hearing something new and cool that you might otherwise have never chosen to listen to.
Too many niche genre bubbles
When people gained the ability to listen to whatever they wanted, they lost exposure to genres and songs others enjoy.
Without this exposure, you miss out on music discovery.
You have the illusion of discovery but the reality is that around 100k+ songs are uploaded to Spotify each day, many in genres you’ve never heard of and many you’ll never hear.
Convincing someone to put up hundreds of thousands of dollars to make a high budget music video for your lame song, was not possible in the past.
And convincing MTV Music to play your iPhone recorded video of your lame song often didn’t go well for the artist lol.
So MTV helped remove a lot of the noise and garbage that floods Spotify and YouTube today.
Barrier to entry
To be fair, most of those 100k+ songs suck but at least with MTV there was a barrier. Before social media was a thing and the labels turned more into conservative investment bankers and data analysists, you had to convince a someone at a record label that you were talented and that they should take a chance on you.
If you were talented, they’d help fund your music creation and promotion. A music video was part art, part promotion all in one. People would get to see who you are, what you can do and could fall in love with you.
MTV was the result of an entire culture. Many music magazines would come out with articles, news and posters, which would fill young girls and boys bedroom walls.
This created culture and fandom.
Without MTV…
Removing MTV Music from existence is another step closer to forcing people into their own individual recommendation algorithms.
Musicians might think this is fine, until they keep making the same type of music, without any influence from outside their genre bubble. Which leads to music stagnation.
I personally think that Gen Z should listen to different types of music, especially if they want to be music creators themselves.
MTV was part of monoculture
What made people in the 80s want to have big afros and flared pants?
What made the 90s feel rebellious and want to dress more individualistic?
You can thank MTV for a lot of the fashion that spread across these decades.
But you can also thank MTV for be part of a system which exposed people to all different types of music and cultures.
MTV in the 90s gave black rappers and singers and voice to white America, to spread cultural issues (hip-hop), love (R&B and Pop) and likely helped break down racial barriers over time.
YouTube, Spotify & Tiktok is not a replacement
Right now, some guy at a label somewhere is paying a “promoter” who is paying a playlist owner, to put a new artist on a playlist, which they signed after they were discovered on a social media platform.
This artist maybe can’t sing, maybe they can’t rap. They might have just gone viral randomly due to some sort of gimmick. They would likely make a terrible video clip.
Meanwhile, in previous decades you had artists like Michael Jackson, turning video clips into works of art and mini movies like Thriller. Inventing dances and performing amazing moves no one had seen before.
With MTV gone, how will fans even know what it will be like to see their artist perform? Maybe they can only lip sync 10 seconds of their song for Tiktok.
At least with a music video, they were forced to remember their song to perform it for the video.
There will probably be a lot of unintended consequences to the removal of the last major music video station in the US.
The MTV Music archive is not enough either
Sure, people could come to this page to experience what it might have been like to watch MTV. But you’re still watching different videos to someone else watching it because it’s not live.
Making a live version of MTV would likely result in the same issue MTV had in the first place.
The record labels got greedy
One of the main reasons MTV started making their own shows instead of playing music videos is to avoid paying licensing fees to the labels.
But if MTV made their own shows, they could avoid these fees.
Radio is different
It’s a little weird because radio has historically been the opposite, with the labels finding loopholes around the payola laws to pay the radio stations to play their music.
The present loophole for radio for the past few decades in most cases has been to pay an independent “promoter” to pay the radio station to run an “advert” which is the entire length of the song, played in between other songs lol. They will always deny this but as someone who worked in radio, I can say from first hand experience that this is what they do.
I also experienced a certain label even going as far as paying to remove ‘competing’ songs from other labels in an attempt to rig the charts. – although that seems far less common.
Compared to TV
Now I don’t know what went on at MTV. Were they paying more to play the music videos than there were receiving back in payola?
I guess at some point, it must have swung back towards being more expensive to play the videos, than to make their own original content.
The rise of original shows
Their own original content and shows must have been more profitable than playing songs, since the amount of music on MTV started to shrink to almost no music even starting from the 90s.
Then, MTV made a spin off channel called MTV2 (1996) which played more music than the main MTV channel. Followed by MTV Classic (1998–2016), which played more older music. And MTV Hits (2002) (rebranded to MTV Music in 2010), which focused on newer music artists. – like what we’d MTV used to be.
Overtime, MTV2 became more like MTV, having mostly reality shows. Leaving only MTV Music.
Did the MTV Payola budget run dry?
When you can run an advert on social media, bot Spotify streams (without the consequences that independent artists have), I suppose bribing MTV to play your artist’s video takes a back seat, especially when viewing habits change.
But this just made it so that MTV playing music videos was not all that profitable.
You would think playing music videos, something that could be automated just like we’re doing on this page, should in theory, just keep going… unless the labels got too greedy. – Demanding payment for playing their artist’s music, with little incentive to do so.
But, this might backfire for the labels now, as they have lost a promotional tool.
Warner Music + Netflix
There are rumors that Warner Music appears to be attempting to compensate the loss of MTV Music by trying to strike a deal with Netflix to run more documentaries for their older artists, to increase streaming of their back catalogue.
Although that might give them more market share in streaming their catalogue’s music, leading to higher payouts, it only exposes people to old already successful artists, rather than new up and coming musicians.
No one wants to watch a documentary on a new artist who’s music they don’t know yet.
So it won’t be a substitute from the exposure they got from MTV Music.
Will Music Videos Still be a thing?
People still google artists. Whenever you hear of a new artist, you’re probably going to Google them.
Google owns YouTube. When you Google an artist and their song, the first thing that often appears on Google is a link to their music video.
So in a way, they’re still needed as part of the discovery process.
The difference is, you’re not just shown the video. You have to search for it or have it recommended to you.
But in a way, it’s like a business card for a musician. You can just tell someone your artist name, and when they search it, up appears the video.
However, you can get a similar result with a lower quality video.
K-Pop has high quality videos today
We’re seeing 90s style quality videos coming out for K-Pop artists. But that isn’t all that relevant to US culture and music.
US artists don’t seem to get big budget levels for music videos anymore and if they do, that video is technically paid for by the artist eventually in most cases, not the label, via royalty recoupment clauses in record contracts. This has always been the case but is more problematic in today’s low payout streaming climate since the record contracts haven’t swung in the favor of the artist more to compensate.
Even the labels are hesitant to have higher budget music videos since they don’t generate as much of a return as their other forms of promotion.
But the labels seem to forget that, music videos aren’t just promotional tools, they have become part of the art and content that artists create.
If you look at some older videos, in some cases, they’re just as much art as the song and can tell an entire story and set a theme and mood, often forcing you to understand the behind certain lyrics.
This is something you don’t get from bribing someone to put the song on a playlist.
Summary
I stopped writing summaries because I’m a human who can do whatever they want to do. I’m sick of every AI blog post ending in a summary. This is technically an evolving story so there is no summary.
Will YouTube find a way to force ads onto the MTV Rewind app?
Will they bribe the dev to take it down so that people are forced onto YouTube – probably.
Will the dev who made it keep harassing everyone to buy him a coffee and die from caffeine poisoning? – most likely
If he dies, who will pay for the server that is powering the app on this page – nobody.
So enjoy it while it lasts and before the labels find a way to ruin another good thing and subscribe to my newsletter in case this page gets delisted from Google and DMCA’ed into oblivion by some intern at one of the major labels who doesn’t understand that they get paid from YouTube when a song plays on here.