Written by: Alex Green

When MTV announced it was going off the air for good at the end of 2025, those who were raised by 120 Minutes, Yo! MTV Raps and Headbangers Ball shuddered at the instant loss of a vital part of their childhood.

Almost as quickly as the legendary music television station quietly slipped into the cultural graveyard, the ghost of the station came back in a slightly different form.

The fan-built site MTV Rewind instantly emerged and not only does it boast close to 30,000 videos that date from the late ’70s to 2026, because the channel isn’t viewer-curated, the random carousel of songs assures the viewer that there’s no way of knowing what comes next. Although we live in an age of closely curated Spotify playlists and social media contacts whose views echo our own, MTV Rewind is the perfect way to give a little control back to the universe.

Built on a continuous play model, MTV Rewind doesn’t silo out blocks of time by genre and videos aren’t heralded by veejays, so the videos that are played are about as random as a channel can get.

Although you can select the era you want, the “shuffle all” option is the best bet because it recreates the feeling of MTV the most authentically.

From its inception, MTV presented a bingo cage of musical possibilities where musical discovery was almost guaranteed and with MTV Rewind, that experience has been recaptured.