On December 31, 2025, music lovers mourned as MTV officially shut down the last of its 24-hour music channels. Programs in Europe and the U.K. were removed from Sky and Virgin Media networks, while in the U.S., the music-only channels will be removed as individual broadcasting contracts expire.
MTV announced the shift away from music-only channels in October 2025, as music consumption has trended toward streaming and on-demand music videos. It’s a sad moment for those of us who grew up with actual music on MTV, and not a near-constant onslaught of Ridiculousness.
However, with a new need emerging in the music video market, one diehard fan has stepped up to meet it. A coder by the name of FlexasaurusRex developed MTV Rewind in 48 hours, a website hosting more than 27,000 music videos continuously, just like MTV used to do. Similarly, there’s no algorithm, no corporate sponsorship, no ads, and no engagement goals. It’s old school entertainment, pure and simple.
MTV Rewind Fills the Void That Trends and Budget Cuts Left Behind
More than just a way to watch music videos the good old-fashioned way, MTV Rewind is Flexasaurus’ answer to hyper-commodified music discovery. As they wrote in several posts on the crypto social media site Farcaster, the site is “a middle finger to algorithmic manipulation, ad-driven content, engagement optimization, data extraction, [and] corporate streaming monopolies.”
Essentially, this is the anti-Spotify, the anti-YouTube. MTV for the modern age, as it should have been. As of this moment, the site hosts 33,478 music videos spanning six decades, from the 1970s to the 2020s. It’s described as “pure random discovery,” but it does allow visitors to choose a specific decade to peruse.
FlexasaurusRex stated that they built the site in part using Claude, the AI tool from Anthropic, using data from the Internet Music Video Database (IMVDb). The site is free and requires no login credentials. Additionally, the site includes a link where users can choose to support them with monetary donations if desired. This helps keep the site up, but also directly supports the creator.
Overall, MTV Rewind is a nostalgic solution to a modern problem. In an age where streaming monopolies and algorithms have beaten music discovery to death, MTV Rewind is a refreshing step back to the days of genuine curiosity and curation.
Photo by Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto via Getty Images
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