Alternatives to MTV in the United States during the Hair Metal years
I grew up in Australia. We didn't get MTV in Australia until the month of my 13th birthday, April 1987.
Think about all the hair metal music videos that were released before that date. In fact, think about every music video released before that date. How did we watch them?
Was Australia behind in showing music videos from musical artists?
To the contrary, Australia was actually one of the places where mass exposure to music videos really took off.
Let's go back to 1974, the year I was born. Two television shows began promoting both local and international touring artists: Sounds and Countdown.
Like Top of the Pops in the UK, the early days of these shows were based around artists miming to their latest single in a "live" studio setting. Over time, both shows increasingly featured promotional videos that were being distributed to nightclubs and public video jukeboxes.
When MTV arrived in Australia, it wasn't a 24-hour music channel. It aired for about three hours a night, from roughly 11pm to 2am, and was more of a music variety show. It featured music videos, music news, pre-recorded interviews, and occasionally live interviews, often via satellite with artists from the US, UK, and Canada.
Before that, I watched my first hair metal videos on shows like Countdown and Sounds. I can still remember watching Livin' on a Prayer around November 1986 on SBS's music show, The Noise.
Sounds aired on Saturday mornings for three hours. It occasionally featured artists miming in the studio, but it mostly showed music videos and included music news from around Australia and the world. Touring artists would often come into the studio for interviews on the couch. It was a very low-budget production, so having bands perform live in the studio probably would have sounded terrible. Ironically, for a show called Sounds, there wasn't much live music because the sound would have sucked.
Around the same time MTV launched as a three-hour free-to-air music television show in Australia, two more free-to-air music programs debuted: Rage and Video Hits.
Rage played music videos from 11pm until 5am on Friday and Saturday nights, including MA15+ clips such as Girls on Film. From 5am to 11am on Saturday and Sunday mornings, the programming switched to PG-rated content.
Video Hits aired PG-rated music videos from 8am on Saturday and Sunday mornings, usually for three or four hours.
Looking at the United States, however, I can only find references to shows that appeared after the "explosion" of MTV. During the hair metal years (see the graph I made), cable penetration grew from about 20% of Americans being reached in 1980 (just before the hair metal era), to around 33% when MTV launched, and then to approximately 55% by the time hair metal's commercial peak had ended.
From the research I've done, hair metal was primarily listened to by middle-class and working-class Americans—people who were arguably less likely to subscribe to cable television. Yet free-to-air television remained hugely popular in the US throughout the period.
Someone in this group recently said that hair metal should be called "MTV Metal." I don't completely disagree with that. But if we're going down that road, then surely we'd also need to call 1980s pop music "MTV Pop."
For me, and for the majority of people outside the United States, MTV wasn't a dedicated music channel on a pay-TV service until after the hair metal years.
In fact, I probably watched more traditional metal and grunge videos once MTV Australia launched as a full channel.
Before that, I watched every hair metal video released in the Australian market on shows other than MTV.
Every Mötley Crüe video.
Every Warrant video.
Every Poison video.
Every Bon Jovi video.
Every Van Halen video.
Every Extreme video.
Every music video considered suitable for television, I watched somewhere other than MTV.
So, my American friends, where did you watch music videos before the internet, particularly between 1981 and 1991?
Was hair metal really exclusive to MTV for you all?
Posted Jun 4, 2026, 12:54 AM UTC