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Which was the first music video MTV aired, on 1 August 1981?
It launched the channel.
MTV went on air at 12:01 a.m. on 1 August 1981, opening with the words Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll. Britannica reports that the first clip shown was Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles, a song about the shift from radio to television. The song itself dates from 1979.
The launch was small. The channel reached only a modest number of cable households, in New Jersey, and the exact count is not given in Britannica. It aired 209 videos in its first 24 hours, many of them more than once, and five video jockeys hosted the debut. Rod Stewart appeared more often than anyone, with 16 appearances.
Early programming leaned toward rock partly because of the founders' tastes and partly because few music videos existed yet. Promotional films for songs were not new, so the novelty was a dedicated 24-hour channel built around them. In the years that followed, artists such as Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, Duran Duran and Cyndi Lauper helped turn the music video into an art form.
The choice of that first title is often called symbolic, but it was in part a practical decision from a small library of available clips.