MTV After MTV
There was a time when getting played on MTV could change your life.
Not because MTV simply showed music videos, but because it sat somewhere between music, fashion, journalism, television and youth culture. It did not just tell you what people were listening to. It helped decide what was worth paying attention to.
Then the internet happened. Spotify, YouTube, TikTok and pretty much every platform with a play button came after that. Now you can discover the best song you have heard all year in a twelve second video of someone making pasta and still have absolutely no idea who the artist is.
So when we were asked to reposition MTV during my master’s in Creative Direction and Communication, trying to bring back the glory days felt like the least interesting thing we could do.
The question was not how do we make MTV cool again?
It was what is MTV actually useful for now?
First, we had to kill a little nostalgia
Looking through old MTV is dangerous because everything about it makes you want to bring it back. The idents, the interviews, the chaotic graphics, the music videos with budgets that would probably get someone fired today, and the feeling that millions of people were watching roughly the same thing at the same time.
But recreating that would basically be MTV doing an impression of MTV.
Music discovery does not work like that anymore. Spotify recommends something while you are cleaning your bathroom. TikTok resurrects a song from 2004 because someone used it under a breakup slideshow. YouTube turns one live performance into a two hour rabbit hole and suddenly you know way too much about the drummer.
We are not struggling to find music. If anything, we are drowning in it. So instead of asking how MTV could distribute music again, we asked something more useful:
What disappeared when MTV stopped doing it?
Artists gained visibility and inherited about twelve new jobs
Technically, musicians have never had more ways to reach people. You can write a song in your bedroom tonight and theoretically have someone in Tokyo listening to it tomorrow morning.
Amazing.
You also need to understand TikTok, Instagram, editing, branding, marketing, analytics, community management, touring, promotion and apparently how to look natural while filming a video that starts with, “Hey guys, a lot of you have been asking how I made this song.”
The same systems that removed a lot of the old gatekeepers also pushed much more responsibility onto the artist. Make something, post it, hope it gets picked up, get numbers, post more because the numbers are going up, then try to turn those numbers into an actual career before everyone moves on.
That contradiction became the part we cared about. The internet had become incredibly good at discovery. What it had not solved was continuity.
We have all watched something go viral and completely forgotten who made it three days later. A viral moment is not a career.
So where could MTV actually fit?
We mapped the music landscape to understand where MTV could realistically sit without pretending Spotify, TikTok and YouTube did not exist.
Most of the obvious spaces were already occupied. Streaming platforms had listening. Social platforms had discovery. Festivals had live culture. Labels still held parts of artist development.
What felt less occupied was everything that happened after someone got attention. How do they keep going? Who helps build the world around the music? Where does the process live once the release cycle moves on?
There was another gap too: curation.
Algorithms are great at finding something you might like. They are less good at giving you a point of view about why something matters, what it connects to or why it belongs to a bigger cultural moment. MTV used to do exactly that. People did not just hear the song. They saw the video, watched the interview, copied the clothes, argued about the performance and probably attempted the haircut.
Music had a life around it. We could not recreate the monoculture that made old MTV possible, but we could reuse the part that still mattered. Instead of creating another spike of attention, MTV could help create a trajectory.
That became the repositioning.
Music To Be
The name came from that same thought.
What if music did not always have to exist just to generate a stream, fill a feed, become content or soundtrack a seven second skincare routine? What else could music be?
Music to be discovered. Music to be identity. Music to be meaningful. Music to be culture. Music to be belonging.
Eventually that became MTB, Music To Be. The phrase was less of a tagline and more of an unfinished sentence because what music is to be depends on the person around it.
For an emerging artist, it could be music to be discovered. For someone who has been doing this for fifteen years, music to be sustained. For the crew and creatives normally hidden behind the artist, music to be recognized. For an audience, music to be shared.
And honestly, we already use music this way.
We make breakup playlists, gym playlists and playlists with names like walking around Barcelona pretending I’m in a film. Spotify Wrapped becomes a public personality test every December. We send someone a song instead of saying what we actually mean.
Music is rarely just something we hear and that was the space we wanted MTV to return to.
Then MTB became a place
Eventually, the idea stopped feeling like a media platform and started behaving more like a cultural ecosystem.
We imagined MTB as a creative village where musicians could work alongside directors, photographers, designers, producers, stylists and everyone else who usually disappears behind one artist name on Spotify.
Artists could develop work, collaborate, experiment and access production tools without every waking moment needing to become promotional content.
The people around them mattered just as much.
It is always slightly funny how an album can appear under one face as if that person also shot the cover, styled themselves, engineered every track, designed the tour visuals and personally loaded the speakers into the venue.
MTB could make that ecosystem visible instead of pretending music magically materializes at midnight on release day.
The magazine became its memory
The editorial side completed that idea.
Rather than another place publishing music news you could already find thirty seconds earlier on Instagram, the MTB magazine would act as an evolving archive of the village.
Every artist, designer, producer, photographer or creative who passed through could leave something behind: a conversation, a sketch, a demo, a failed idea, behind the scenes material, the story behind an album cover or the process that turned an early idea into the final thing.
The audience would not only see what was being released. They could see how culture actually gets made.
The village would make culture. The magazine would remember how it happened.
Over time, it would become an archive not just of artists, but of the communities, crews and collaborations that made their work possible.
Less breaking news, more cultural memory.
Making it look like MTB
Eventually, the idea stopped feeling like a media platform and started behaving more like a cultural ecosystem.
We imagined MTB as a creative village where musicians could work alongside directors, photographers, designers, producers, stylists and everyone else who usually disappears behind one artist name on Spotify.
Artists could develop work, collaborate, experiment and access production tools without every waking moment needing to become promotional content.
The people around them mattered just as much.
It is always slightly funny how an album can appear under one face as if that person also shot the cover, styled themselves, engineered every track, designed the tour visuals and personally loaded the speakers into the venue.
MTB could make that ecosystem visible instead of pretending music magically materializes at midnight on release day.
The magazine became its memory
The editorial side completed that idea.
Rather than another place publishing music news you could already find thirty seconds earlier on Instagram, the MTB magazine would act as an evolving archive of the village.
Every artist, designer, producer, photographer or creative who passed through could leave something behind: a conversation, a sketch, a demo, a failed idea, behind the scenes material, the story behind an album cover or the process that turned an early idea into the final thing.
The audience would not only see what was being released. They could see how culture actually gets made.
The village would make culture. The magazine would remember how it happened.
Over time, it would become an archive not just of artists, but of the communities, crews and collaborations that made their work possible.
Less breaking news, more cultural memory.
Making it look like MTB
Visually, we wanted enough MTV DNA for the connection to feel obvious without making it look like MTV had downloaded TikTok yesterday.
We kept the red, used bold typography and built the identity around the flexible Music To Be language, allowing the phrase to shift across different artists, stories and activations.
The system expanded across the village, magazine, audiovisual pieces, social, outdoor and digital experiences.
It was not really saying MTV is back.
It was more like MTV had finally found a new job.
What I keep coming back to
At the beginning, repositioning MTV sounded like a branding problem. By the end, it felt much more like a question about what happens when an industry becomes obsessed with visibility.
The obvious answer would have been to make MTV louder, faster and more digital, which is useful because clearly the internet’s biggest problem right now is that there is not enough content.
The more interesting opportunity was almost the opposite.
The internet already knew how to make music appear.
MTV could become useful again by helping it stay. Helping a song become a career, an artist become part of a scene, a collaboration leave a trace, and music become identity, belonging, meaning or culture instead of another thing we scroll past while waiting for the bus.
Maybe MTV did not need to decide what music was to be heard anymore.
It could help create everything music was to be.
