The role of online video in the music industry is vast and complex. Some labels have uploaded extensive collections of artist videos while others aggressively block any whiff of content on YouTube and elsewhere: even cover bands can be taken down, for example, even though the garage band is no threat to sales of the covered song and may actually stimulate demand for the original. The vast, low-cost distribution of online video music led to the Chicago band OK Go to sever ties with their record label in 2010, for example, and the band continues to innovate ways to garner attention (in Super Bowl commercials and video game soundtracks, among others). As the band’s website puts it,
Continuing a career that includes viral videos, New York Times op-eds, a major label split and the establishment of a DIY trans-media mini-empire, collaborations with pioneering dance companies and tech giants, animators and Muppets, OK Go continue to fearlessly dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have all but dissolved.
The end of the need for physical distribution of plastic discs to retailers with finite shelf space serving consumers with fickle taste (making forecasting a key activity) opens up many new avenues: niche acts can find their audiences, established artists can release experimental material, and encyclopedic coverage of live sets can be practical.
Independent of the artist experimentation epitomized by OK Go and Patreon-funded efforts including Pamplamouse (crowd-funders get tutorials, behind-the-scenes interviews, early access to new releases, and other benefits), a vast segment of YouTube is devoted to old (“classic”) performances. While jazz greats, TV orchestras backing late-night hosts (including Frank Zappa playing on the Mike Douglas Show), and every niche audience imaginable can be found, the baby boomer generation is heavily represented. The role of YouTube as a collective attic for tens of millions of listener-remembers bears mention.
One important function of these communities in response to music videos is to find solidarity in nostalgia. Unlike the physical experience of a Coasters, a Rolling Stones, or a Celine Dion concert, one can connect with fellow fans in response to the richness of aural and video cues asynchronously and without any limitation on physical location. A common theme within these comments sections is to denigrate “today’s” music (defined loosely) by praising the taste, talent, and/or popularity of a bygone performer. It is also common for a younger viewer to counter the criticism either by naming names of current artists with taste or talent, or by critiquing the performance being rhapsodized.
But YouTube is far more than people watching and typing about music videos. Mashups of various kinds can express nostalgia through parody, pastiche, or other participation. Sounds connected to nostalgia may be video game soundtracks, modem handshakes, or even K-Mart in-store marketing. Furthermore, a whole sub-genre of videos has emerged that has parallels to the massively popular “unboxing” theme. Young people (generally but not always) will train the webcam on themselves and play a classic cut in an inset window on the screen. Thus a fan of, say, Stevie Ray Vaughn can see complete strangers (ostensibly) discover the greatness of the late blues guitarist. Never before could somebody watch a video, capture one’s own reaction to it, and post the meta-video for anyone on the planet to consume at his or her whim.
It is not often expressed in these terms, but YouTube utilizes cloud computing to become a cultural repository, a shared attic of memory. Independent of every other function it performs – and there are many – YouTube’s ability to hold and distribute billions of cultural memories is important but under-recognized. As John David Ebert notes, for centuries those cultural memories were bound up in print: from stone carvings on tombstones to the works of a Darwin or Curie, to be literate was to have access to the words and maybe drawings of the past. (John David Ebert, The New Media Invasion (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), p. 43.) In a heartbeat of historical time (less than five years), that changed.
YouTube’s repository of video and audio recordings marks a milestone in the history of music (among other art forms, which I will acknowledge but not discuss further here). Going back to the late 19th century, music was a key motivation for the development of the telephone: a number of books verging on science fiction envisioned a service whereby listeners could enjoy concerts without being in the hall. The performances were synchronous; the notion of sound recording succeeded the hope for simultaneous transmission by about 50 years. It is impossible to recall, but not that long ago, a person of means and cultural access might hear a given Beethoven symphony once in his or her lifetime. Shortly later, the LP record made it possible to hear a Toscanini or von Karajan performance ad infinitum.
This change in the cultural inheritance – in making music permanently available in copy form rather than only being ephemeral and synchronous – also changed music from a communal experience to a small-group or individual one. Whereas in the 19th century many communities had bands or even citizen orchestras, recording shrunk the audience from dozens or hundreds down to handfuls. Numerous illustrations from the 1950s feature a couple lounging in front of a hi-fi system; magazines from Gramophone to Audio to Playboy advised readers on matters of equipment and listening choices. National Lampoon, for a time the most-read magazine in the college demographic, served up a large helping of stereo ads in the mid-1970s to support such writers as P.J. O’Rourke, John Hughes, Doug Kenney. Later, after the iPod became popular in the early 21st century, recorded listening became solitary. What had been a ritual for decades for young soldiers and students – buying and enjoying an audio system – faded from fashion as headphones and earbuds took center stage. Receivers and speakers, once ubiquitous in a certain demographic, became niche markets. But YouTube recreates collective musical listening/reaction as an asynchronous virtual experience in contrast to people sitting in the same room.
As of 2019, YouTube is by far the largest streamer of music on the Internet. (This is not new: a 2011 “Critical Viewers Guide” to the service asserted that “Music dominates YouTube.”) It is used daily by hundreds of millions of young adults. It is primarily watched on mobile devices. Taken together, these facts begin to suggest how the service has reshaped music consumption. First, unlike some services, YouTube songs can be chosen by name. If the proper settings are chosen, the service will then auto-play a continuous soundtrack of music related to the initial selection: the algorithms have a much easier time with music than in getting other types of content to play automatically and coherently. This makes it a cousin of Napster or Grooveshark, a music streaming site shut down by the record labels in 2015. While the selection is broad and deep (including bootlegs and B-sides in some cases), it is not inclusive: a number of artists have estates or offices that take down any material associated with the act. These exceptions have not diminished the site’s popularity, and the volume of available material can satisfy most any listener, anywhere: global mass and niche markets alike are well served.
Where YouTube differs from radio or iTunes, however, is in the comment function. Listeners can post technical information (time/track listings), trivia (who was the uncredited saxophonist?), affirmations/denigrations, and memories. This annotation function means that communities can form around a song that carries special emotional weight. These communities have no intention, no formal organization, and no premeditation. As Clay Shirky noted in Here Comes Everybody, coordination goes from being an organization’s function to being a feature of the infrastructure. People can contribute as much or as little as they like, when they feel so moved, with no awareness or forethought of when other people might be listening, available, or interested.
YouTube thus replaces stereo playback systems (at the individual or small-group level), radio (in some respects), and record stores (either physical ones or Apple/Amazon) as distribution network, expert recommender, and fan club. Seeing the service only in its role as streamer (distributor) is understandable but misses what Shirky calls the “collaborative infrastructure” that provides inchoate social groups the ability to coalesce and communicate, ever so ephemerally. For all the attention rightly paid to the prodigious upload and download numbers attached to YouTube’s videos, the huge crowdsourcing effort also present on the site can get lost if one isn’t looking for it.
Consider just a few examples, chosen at random.
· A Dutch uploader found a Scopitone video (a 1960s video jukebox popular in Europe) of Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale.” After some cleanup, the video has been viewed more than 100,000,000 times. The comments appear to come from many parts of the world, connecting tens of thousands of people (30,000 comments) who will never cross physical paths and few of whom were alive when the song was on the radio.
· About the same year, Atlantic Records released the dance tune “Tighten Up” by Archie Bell and the Drells (of Houston, Texas). The song, viewed nearly 8 million times, remains infectious and original. Here, the comments tell a different story. Pop Dada wrote
archie , I was in nam in 68 ... one night we was dancing to tighten up .. some of the guys..next day we lost 4 of my squad ..ambush .. we fought all day and night.. but I always remember that night and day .. one minute we were back in the world ,, hours later some of us had left it behind and died at 20..i didn't know I had ptsd till maybe 15 yrs later .. I was driving with my wife and "tighten up" came on the radio ... all of a sudden I thought of that night . the guys dancing then losing them the next day and my eyes swelled up with tears because the memory of them was so strong .. we were with Charlie co. 2/506th 101st Airborne Div. we were the 1st Platoon. thanks man your song carries a lot of weight with me brother.. ... you got hit too.. yea man me too.
More than 100 people wrote back with affirmations, sympathy, and thanks for his military service.
· Aretha Franklin, a force of nature in any medium, is a powerful figure on YouTube, with multiple videos getting 10 million+ views. One stands out as a kind of landmark. In 2015 she performed “(You Make Me Feel) Like a Natural Woman” at the Kennedy Center Honors performance, paying tribute to the song’s co-writer Carole King, one of the night’s honorees. The TV special was viewed by 7.5 million viewers, who saw Franklin deliver a stunning performance; King herself was clearly moved by the 73-year-old’s rendition. In only four years, YouTube viewers have seen the performance roughly 33 million times, highlighting the importance of the service for broadcast-like reach as well as effectively infinite selection.
· Sakamichi no Apollon (Kids on the Slope) is a Japanese anime that aired in 2012. Jazz specifically and music generally are a central force in the storyline, based on a prize-winning manga of the same name. In one episode, one of the aforementioned kids is playing Art Blakey’s jazz standard “Moanin’” on an organ in an empty church. The young priest silently enters and joins him on drums in a skilled, emotionally rich improvisation. The clip is of course available on YouTube, as is the Blakey original, and the respective comment threads tell the story of bidirectional trans-Pacific cultural transmission. Each video has more than a million views, and there are clearly people being introduced to entirely new art forms in a way no other medium could have facilitated.
This participation in the preservation, propagation, and repetition of past musical performances and styles is also important in the context of the history of popular music. Between the late 1990s and possibly until the present day, public performance of music (live and via electronic distribution) has been dominated by aging rockers, established country acts, and a handful of hip-hop superstars who have become the dominant face of their genre. Nothing in genre terms has broken through the way rock and roll did in the 1950s, hard bop jazz did in the late 1950s/early 1960s, acid rock did in the 1960s, punk did in the ‘70s, or hip-hop did in the ‘80s. That’s upwards of 35 years in western culture without a major shift in musical direction, maybe slightly less if electronica/techno/rave is counted as major.
Rather than innovations in musical style, the 20+ years of music on the Internet have been characterized by technological innovation. The late 1990s initially saw MP3 file sharing through Napster, which then evolved into BitTorrent (and its grey-area variants) plus legal services including Apple’s iTunes and Amazon Music. More recently, the notion of a music “file” has been eclipsed by streaming media, including of course YouTube, which delivers more online music than any other service. (It also pays by far the lowest royalties: 49% of overall streams provided only 7% of royalty payments.) The innovations have been far more in the technologies of distribution and consumption (those earbuds) than in any artistic realm.
This technological facilitation of nostalgia serves many social functions beyond the individual frissons of memory. People can bond over shared tastes or memories, they can feel and assert a sense of meaning (many Vietnam veterans recall where they were and who they were with when certain songs were playing), and people situate themselves (and identify with others) with temporal anchors: I was X years old in Y school when that song came out, possibly driving a Z car.
This is but one corner of one “neighborhood” on YouTube. The service has reinvented other domains, whether education (particularly via Sal Khan’s tutorials that became Khan Academy and helped “flip the classroom”), beauty and cosmetics through a new class of influencers, and extremist groups that recruit on the platform. While it is impossible to map the terrain of YouTube, it is important to begin to appreciate the magnitude of the changes it is introducing.
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