We never stopped making them

MTV switched off its last music channels on New Year’s Eve 2025, after 44 years. The final video was the one it opened with in 1981.

Video Killed the Radio Star.

I turned it on the day I read about it. Found the holding screen. Sat with it longer than made any sense for a grown man who runs a business.

I wasn’t expecting to feel anything. I was wrong about that.

Not that long ago, culture arrived whether you wanted it or not. Not curated. Not personalised. Not served to you by a system determined, with a fervour bordering on the romantic, to show you nothing else for the rest of your life.

It just arrived. On the telly. At the same time. For everyone.

Top of the Pops, Thursday evenings. Your nan. Your parents. You. Your dad watching from behind a newspaper while pretending he had better things to do. The same songs, and the same slightly uncomfortable experience of sitting with your entire family while someone performed something clearly not intended for the over-forties.

It wasn’t cool. It was never meant to be cool. It was universal. And that turned out to matter in ways nobody understood until it was gone.

The second wave

Then came ours. The young and the slightly strange. The people who stayed up late for Channel 4 and ran into school the next morning with something urgent to say.

MTV meant something before most of us could get it. It existed in America, which in the mid-nineties still felt like a different planet where things happened first and louder. By the time satellite arrived, MTV was where artists could reach into the living rooms of an entire generation, at once, without anyone deciding first whether it was appropriate.

Bowie. Nirvana. Prince. Tupac. Not just artists. Events. They landed on a whole generation at the same moment. The culture arrived fully formed, and you were in it.

The artists who used that shared stage to say something that mattered were, more often than not, people who felt things at a frequency the rest of the world found uncomfortable. They had a direct line into the hearts of a generation at the same time. That window had never existed before. It hasn’t existed since.

How it closed

People used to worry about too much television. But at least you watched it together, in the front room, on the one screen the family shared. Then televisions appeared in bedrooms. Then the channels multiplied: three became four, then five, then thirty with satellite, then hundreds with digital. Every new choice was a small act of dispersal.

Then the phone arrived. And the phone doesn’t stay in the front room.

It goes to bed with you. On the train. To the loo. It is always there and it is always choosing for you, and what it chooses is whatever keeps you looking at it longest. We didn’t lose shared culture in one moment. We traded it away one channel and one device at a time, until we woke up inside a system designed to show each of us a different world.

The algorithm isn’t neutral. It is an opinion about what you should see, rendered invisible. Its opinion, at scale, is that you should see more of what you already agree with.

More voices. Fewer moments. That isn’t a paradox. That is the product working as intended.

Where it still happens

I run a company called Dig In. We work with brands that want to reach students: half a million of them, at more than 160 universities, every year.

I’m aware of the irony. I’m a founder. I sell things. Bowie sold records on a major label while writing songs about liberation, which is either deeply hypocritical or entirely human, depending on your generosity.

Dig In doesn’t replace what MTV was. Nothing does.

But every September, half a million students arrive at university for the first time. The same few weeks. The same moment in their lives. The week habits form and loyalties get built, when they are more open to change than they will ever be again.

And we put something in their hands. Not targeted. Not personalised. The same thing, for all of them, at the same time: the Dig In Welcome Bag.

In a world that has abolished the shared moment, that isn’t nothing. It might be the closest thing left.

You can’t manufacture a shared moment through a feed. The feed, by design, prevents them.

We never stopped making them.

Want your brand in the bag this September? Talk to us.