🎶 📺 History of MTV Video Music Awards : Very First 1984 MTV Video Music Awards

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September 14, 2025
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Nina Nebo
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The first MTV Video Music Awards were held on September 14, 1984, at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City. The inaugural ceremony honored the best music videos of the previous year and featured performances by artists such as Madonna, Tina Turner, and David Bowie, with Herbie Hancock and Michael Jackson being the most-awarded artists of the night.

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The MTV Video Music Awards (commonly abbreviated as the VMAs) is an award show presented by the cable channel MTV to honor the best in the music video medium. Originally conceived as an alternative to the Grammy Awards (in the video category), the annual MTV Video Music Awards ceremony has often been called the Super Bowl for youth, an acknowledgment of the VMA ceremony's ability to draw millions of youth from teens to 20-somethings each year. By 2001, the VMA had become a coveted award.

The annual VMA ceremony occurs before the end of summer and held either in late August or mid-September, and broadcast live on MTV, along with a "roadblock" simulcast across MTV's sister networks since 2014, which is utilized to maximize the ceremony's ratings.

The statue given to winners is an astronaut on the Moon, one of the earliest representations of MTV, and was colloquially called a "moonman", though it has been called a "moon person" by MTV since the 2017 ceremony. The statue was conceived by Manhattan Design, who were also designers of the original MTV logo, based on the 1981 Top of the Hour animation created by Fred Seibert .

Herbie Hancock was the show's most-awarded artist, taking home five awards, followed by Michael Jackson, who won three. The main award, Video of the Year, went to The Cars for "You Might Think". This was the first instance of only a few in the show's history where the video of the year did not win any other awards. Hancock's "Rockit" and The Police's "Every Breath You Take" were the most-nominated videos, receiving eight nominations apiece. Cyndi Lauper was the most-nominated artist of the night, with nine overall for two of her videos: six for "Girls Just Want to Have Fun", which eventually won the Moonman for Best Female Video, and three for "Time After Time".

Other major nominees included Jackson and The Cars, both of whom received six nominations each for their videos "Thriller" and "You Might Think" respectively; ZZ Top, who received six nominations among their videos for "Legs", "Sharp Dressed Man", and "Gimme All Your Lovin'"; and Billy Idol, who garnered five nominations for "Dancing with Myself" and "Eyes Without a Face". Lastly, David Bowie earned four nominations for his "China Girl" and "Modern Love" videos, and was also one of the honorees for the Video Vanguard award.

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