Review: Why Did MTV Stop Playing Music?

Former VJ Dave Holmes explores the channel's history on his podcast, Who Killed the Video Star.

It's one of pop culture's great questions: Why did MTV, a cable network literally called "Music Television," stop playing music?

Written and hosted by Dave Holmes—himself a former MTV host—the podcast Who Killed the Video Star? offers an answer. As Holmes demonstrates, what took the M out of MTV was largely supply and demand.

When MTV premiered in 1981, music videos were a novelty; a network that played them 24/7 appealed even to cynical Gen Xers. But the format wasn't conducive to setting competitive ad rates: The entire programming lineup was identical—a random music video, then another one—and viewers could change the channel when a song ended if they didn't like the one that came on next.

"MTV doesn't play music anymore" is a complaint nearly as old as the network itself, as executives embraced more conventional programming to keep viewers engaged for longer than three minutes at a time. The advent of YouTube put virtually every music video in history at your fingertips, making MTV—so radically inventive just a generation earlier—as obsolete as FM radio.

Where it once showed only music videos, MTV now airs almost nothing but unscripted shows about internet videos. The reason, as the podcast finds, is simple: because that's what people will watch.