A Channel That Only Played Songs

There was a time when you could flip on the television at two in the morning and a channel would just be playing music videos. No hosts, no celebrity countdowns, no reality format—just someone’s curation of what was worth watching that hour, and then the next video, and the next. MTV dismantled that version of itself slowly and deliberately, replacing it with programming that had nothing to do with music, and by 2010 there was no real equivalent left. What remained was dating shows and ringtone ads wearing the corpse of the idea.

So this journal started collecting them instead. Every video worth preserving—Robyn, Lykke Li, Bat for Lashes, Katy B, whatever was actually good that week—got posted and then mostly vanished into the timeline, buried under the next thing. The fix was a dedicated page: one wall of videos, updated whenever something new went up, everything in one place. Not a channel exactly. More like a personal archive that happened to be public.

It was never going to be MTV. But then, neither was MTV anymore.