To Stream or To Scroll

By Luke Albert

At 12:01 a.m. on August 1, 1981, the birth of MTV was trumpeted in by an obituary. The music video for The Buggles’ 1979 hit “Video Killed the Radio Star” pushed MTV headfirst into every boxy television in America, ushering in an era of youth-centered monoculture and consumerism. The song posits that the death of radio is like the death of a shooting star, mourning its fleeting spectacle and fearing what happens when the stardust settles. On December 31, 2025, the stardust settled on MTV: the network shuttered its international music channels after over four decades. “Video Killed The Radio Star” was the final music video to play on MTV UK.

In the static of 2026, the TV star’s killer is short-form video content. Americans increasingly encounter music in fragmented soundbites, served up by algorithms that know our individual pleasure systems better than we do. As songs generated by artificial intelligence (AI) companies creep up the charts, we have no choice but to cower even further into ourselves. With every scroll, we become one swipe closer to the day the music dies. And when the stardust settles, we’ll be right down there with the radio star, who will likely implode too.

In a culture captivated by “Fruit Love Island,” an AI-generated remake of “Love Island” where human contestants are replaced by anthropomorphic fruit characters, watching a Netflix original series written by real humans is a radical act. Though both kinds of content are often consumed alone, TV shows and movies on streaming platforms have spawned some of the defining monocultural moments of our time—and they’re nearly always fueled by music. Famously, the song that brings Max Mayfield back from the Upside Down in Season 4 of “Stranger Things” brought Kate Bush back to the top of the charts for the first time in 44 years. Though the official music video for “Running Up That Hill” was never aired on MTV, the song became a definitive moment of 2022 for Gen Zers (and their parents alike).

Last year, the breakout Crave original series “Heated Rivalry” shed new light on Wolf Parade’s 2005 song “I’ll Believe in Anything,” turning it into a show-defining song and LGBTQ anthem. The song soundtracks two pivotal moments of queer visibility: a kiss televised nationally during a men’s hockey game and an intimate exchange on a private phone call. The scene also signaled a turning point in the athletic world, prompting several male athletes to open up about their queerness after its release. “I’ll Believe in Anything” has amassed over 130 million streams on Spotify, and the episode featuring it is one of the highest-rated television episodes of all time. The song has become a beacon of queer affirmation, bringing sunshine to a dark time for many LGBTQ Americans.

Robyn’s 2010 tears-in-the-club classic “Dancing On My Own” has also reentered the hearts of listeners through its use in the Netflix original movie “Voicemails for Isabelle.” Within 12 days of the movie’s release, streams of “Dancing On My Own” increased by over 500%, jumping from 175,000 daily streams to over one million. The film recasts the song as an anthem of resilience, playing as the main character, Jill, dances through grief in the aftermath of her sister’s death.

The song soundtracks a different kind of catharsis in Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” a 2010s, millennial-minded series finding a new audience in Gen Z viewers on HBO Max. Rather than navigating grief, the main character Hannah Horvath dances alone in triumph after tweeting the perfect summation of a day that began with a positive HPV test and ended with her college ex-boyfriend coming out as gay. Her best friend and roommate, Marnie Michaels, returns from a similarly strange night, and the two dance together. Though “Voicemails for Isabelle” and “Girls” depict different kinds of sisterhood, “Dancing On My Own” aligns them in the same rhythmic heartbeat.

Whether rooted in love, grief, or every weird thing in between, each of these music-backed moments captures distinctly human feelings that cannot be generated artificially. Rather than simply introducing iconic songs to new audiences, film and television use music to remind us of our inviolable capacity for passion, liberation, and human connection. The cultural resurgence of these songs reminds us that the threads of human experience withstand even our most fragmented forms of consumption. So, the stardust never quite settles; it only changes shape with the screens through which we see it.