Yeah, I was born the year MTV launched. So it’s always been a thing at least until the mid 00s when Viacom started to not give a fuck about many of their cable networks and it slowly devolved into another channel full or reality tv dreck.
Peak MTV for me was early to mid 90s though I watched it well after that. In the 90s it was mostly videos with a smattering of original programming tossed into the mix. Remote Control, MTV Sports, Real World, House Of Style, Beavis & Butt-Head, Singled Out, etc… were a nice occasional change of pace but it was still like 80% music videos. As more and more of their brand became youth culture based than music based my interest waned more and more.
I am sure they have sound that they can get just as many people watching the channel today with endless reruns of Ridiculousness as they could with music videos but it’s still a bummer to channel specialization essentially disappear though at this point Cable TV as a whole is kind of on its last leg so it doesn’t probably matter all that much anyways.