Photo Credit: Pet Shop Boys – “West End Girls” on MTV Rewind
A fan project recreates the old-school music video format of the original MTV, but Paramount already seems poised to shut it down.
Gen X and elder millennials have long known that MTV has gone the way of the dodo, even as a smattering of classic music video channels proliferate (in ever-decreasing regions) under the brand. These days, you might best know MTV as the home of reality shows and Paramount-owned comedies. But a fan has created a free MTV simulator website to capture the nostalgia of the original—and it’s simple but effective.
MTV Rewind is a website that aims to recreate the experience of watching the original music video channel. When you first load the page, it plays the original MTV broadcast—complete with VJ introductions and the first music videos that were aired when the channel went live back in August 1981.
From there, you can choose different decades made up of playlists full of thousands of music videos and even era-appropriate TV ads. However, it’s immediately apparent that behind the retro-appropriate shell, most of the work involves pulling videos from YouTube. That seems to enable MTV Rewind to offer what it does for free and without running into legal tape; after all, it’s basically a fancy embedded YouTube player.
The developer of MTV Rewind said in a Reddit thread that the project was built over the last week “as a passion project because of a deep nostalgia and old school sadness I felt from MTV rug pulling 24/7 music videos.”
“The ‘commercials’ are archived […] ads (Blockbuster, GAK, Mentos, etc.) that randomly inject between videos—just for nostalgia. Zero actual ads or monetization,” the developer writes. “27K videos across 7 channels (70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s, plus Yo! MTV Raps). All pulled from YouTube, completely free to use.”
MTV Rewind also offers channels for classic shows and formats the OGs might remember: 120 Minutes, MTV Unplugged, Headbangers Ball, and Club MTV. But the channels that aren’t just 24/7 music videos might get nixed pretty quickly.
Digital Music News noticed that if you click on the MTV Unplugged channel, for example, you’ll find fewer and fewer videos that will actually play. Presumably, this is because Paramount is issuing copyright strikes to the YouTube channels hosting the videos. Indeed, it seems that within the last couple of days since the project went live, fewer MTV VJ interstitials appear as well.
But if you’re looking for the experience of decade-specific music videos playing in the background while you work or study, MTV Rewind is great at offering just that, for as long as it lasts. Your mileage may vary regarding the authentic MTV VJ intros or MTV Unplugged sets (or anything else from the properly owned specifically by Paramount).
