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MTV still heavily played music videos in the early 1990s like they had done throughout the 1980s. I was an 80s teen. My opinion is that the music artists with their "heyday" in the 80s were most noticably absent on MTV or the radio by the early 90s. If they were, they were clearly past their peak. A good example is Duran Duran. They were on MTV constantly in the early to mid 1980s with many sold out concerts. I remember at one concert there were literally thousands of girls lined up just to meet Simon Lebon. Their tour in the summer of 1984 was just a giant party for 1980s teens and young adults. They were a young band in their 20s playing sold out concerts to the young teens of the time. Other popular groups of the same genre included Tears for Fears, Van Halen, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Prince, the Cure, the Police, etc. By the early 1990s, most of them were noticeably absent from MTV. If they were present, it wasn't the same. Sting, the Cure, and Tears for Fears had their last hits around 1993 - but it wasn't with the same intensity and success of the 80s. They were clearly on the decline and getting middle aged.
Meanwhile, around 1992 grunge rock made a hard entrance into MTV. It was a big part of the spring break specials in 1992 with Nirvana. Other groups began to surface like 311, Smashing Pumpkins, etc. I would say 1992 was the time when it was clear that the 80s had distinctly different sounds and artists which were now part of the "past". They were not longer on MTV that much, and new 90s music was on fire like Toad Wet Sprockets, the Cranberries, etc. Duran Duran had their last hit around early 1993 with "Ordinary World" - sort of a homage to their heyday now in the past.
I would put that time of 80s retro-reliazation as 1992 if the inflection of new 1990s music is to be categorized definitively by the amount of air play.
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