The date 1 August 1981 is just as important for music video as 28 December 1895 was for cinema. Much like film existed before the Lumiere brothers' first public showing in Paris, the music video led a relatively established existence before MTV began broadcasting. But the events that unfolded on these two dates irreversibly accelerated the far-ranging development of both formats. 

Both events have another thing in common: their reconstruction is imbued with distorted mythology. In the case of the Lumiere brothers, an exaggerated anecdote is often related that spectators, on seeing L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (this film was not even showing that night), started screaming and running out of the theatre to Salon Indien. Similarly, MTV’s opening sequence of a shuttle launch, an astronaut plating an MTV flag on the moon followed by Buggles' Video Killed the Radio Star, intuitively seems to have unmistakably launched a revolution in those several minutes.

The truth of the matter is, however, that efforts to spread this channel’s influence all over the globe took years, and ran the risk of failure. An ironic historical fact is that almost nobody saw those iconic first live minutes of MTV, because in 1981 the channel was so marginal and obscure that the likelihood of its being included in a cable-TV scheme equalled the odds of winning the lottery. It is also little known that broadcasting was suspended after the initial few minutes due to a technical failure. And, ultimately, this station didn't start its revolutionary promotion of genres like hip hop until the second half of the 1980s with Yo! MTV Raps. Until then, MTV was a distinctly white channel (even to the extent of racism), focused on pop and rock music for suburban and urban audiences.

However, it was these launch problems that unexpectedly produced a positive outcome. When MTV began broadcasting, music videos – due to their scarcity – were sourced from the four corners of the earth and mostly included just recorded studio and concert acts. 

MTV, however, was the first media platform on which short music clips of this kind were contrasted and compared in a showcase, which sparked a heated rivalry among publishers and musicians to make these videos even better, more interesting, more original. And that was the legendary revolutionary shift – the idea of inviting established TV and film directors to work on a video, and not simply engaging the cameramen who were operating the camera that day. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was this idea that helped fuel a boom in music-video creativity, which often hugely impacted pop culture across the globe. 

On the 40th anniversary of MTV, it is therefore important to recognize how much this channel has done for the music video, the videos we watch today in completely different circumstances on social media platforms such as YouTube. Indeed, the internet and digitisation have put an end to a centralised distribution system that made videos an instant and wide-ranging global phenomenon. Instead, what we’ve come by is an extremely democratised, rich, broad and dispersed supply that has retained all its inherent creative power. Music video masterpieces tend to emerge anywhere today: it could be a pop artist, a big label and a notable director, or a small, independent, home-made video shot with a smartphone by a talented teenager. It is exciting to live in times when creativity is so diverse and accessible to emerge in completely unexpected places. Our task in this post-MTV era is to try to look past the persistent online algorithms to discover new breakthroughs that, hidden from sight, exist beyond commercial and ideological categorizations.