CBS Acquires MTV Video Music Awards

The MTV Video Music Awards, long seen on MTV and its sister cable outlets without a live broadcast component, will air on CBS for the first time in 2025.

For the first time in history, the VMAs will air live on CBS, ending a decades-long stretch of exclusivity on MTV. Set to broadcast from 8 to 11 p.m. ET on September 7, the event will also simulcast on MTV. But it’s CBS, with its broader reach, where producers are banking on a surge in viewership.

This shift arrives as MTV continues to navigate a long decline. Once the defining voice of music television, MTV has steadily lost its cultural stronghold. While the 2024 VMAs drew the largest multi-network audience the show has seen in four years—a 25 percent increase from the previous year—that momentum owes more to CBS’s reach than MTV’s fading influence. Paramount+ streaming the show the following day helped, but the real strategy now lies in mass exposure on traditional broadcast.

MTV’s identity crisis isn’t new. The cancellation of Total Request Live in 2008 marked the beginning of a slow unraveling. Once a hub for music discovery and youth culture, the network shifted toward reality programming, sidelining the very content that built its brand.

In today’s media landscape, where Gen Z discovers music on TikTok, YouTube, and Spotify, television feels increasingly irrelevant. Audiences no longer wait for a network to tell them what’s trending. They find it themselves—instantly, on their phones.

The decline has had real consequences. In 2023, MTV cut 25 percent of its domestic workforce and shuttered MTV News.

The move wasn’t just symbolic—it confirmed what many already suspected: MTV’s core mission had become unsustainable. With linear television on life support and digital platforms dictating cultural tides, parent company Paramount is making a strategic retreat from niche cable.

This year’s VMAs follow the same playbook used by the CMT Music Awards, which also migrated to CBS in 2024. That transition served as a quiet test case, and the results were evidently favorable.

The logic is clear—legacy cable brands can no longer carry high-profile broadcasts alone. CBS offers reach, stability, and the kind of mainstream legitimacy MTV can no longer guarantee.

The UBS Arena in Elmont, New York, will host the ceremony, adding a fresh backdrop to a show that now seeks reinvention. Whether it’s enough to preserve the VMAs’ cultural relevance remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: music television, as defined by MTV, no longer sets the tone.

The future is multiplatform, algorithm-driven, and platform-agnostic. The VMAs are just trying to keep up.

via: Hot 97

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