Helena Mounesa, 15, who arrived six hours early, was rewarded with glimpses of Beyoncé and Snoop Dogg. Though a longtime fan of the show, she had never waited outside the building before.

“I was waiting until I was 16,” she said. “But it’s ending now.”

In the music industry reaction to the show’s cancellation was mixed. Even with a diminished audience “TRL” offered powerful promotion, and executives at the major record companies say they lobbied MTV to keep it on the air. The show’s replacement is “FNMTV,” which stands for “Friday Night MTV” and concentrates on more plays of fewer videos.

But the influence of “TRL” had fallen from its height, when an artist’s appearance all but guaranteed a sales spike, said Lou Robinson, a video promotion executive at the RCA Music Group.

“To spend all that money to have an artist to come in and do two segments and show 20 seconds of the video, it’s not money well spent,” he said.

Instead of fighting the migration of audiences online, however, MTV has lately embraced the shift by building up a robust Web presence and heavily promoting it on air. New videos are often included in what MTV calls “credit squeezes”  brief clips played during the closing credits of its most popular shows  with viewers directed to watch the whole thing online.

“The channel has really become a barker for all the music available digitally on MTV.com,” said Brian Graden, president of entertainment for MTV. “We could sit here and wish that technology was the way it was, or we can try to get ahead of it.”