Hello blog family and
welcome back to week 5 of “I’ve got you covered”!
I hope you all had a
super fun and hopefully safe St. Patty’s day weekend. Today we are going to be
exploring the world wide phenomenon of YouTube!
As I understand, YouTube
has become something that is very important as the world goes toward technology
and social media instead of one on one reactions. This company caters to the “I
want it now” general mindset of the 21st century generation. People
are able to search anything and they will almost always find a video for it in
2 seconds flat.
I know from personal
experience with my youngest sister, there is a whole culture surrounding it
where people film themselves doing anything and everything to gain subscribers. For example, the day after Christmas my
sister sat in her room for half of the day and watched every gift haul video
there was from the fay before. I went in her room and watched one with her and I
saw these people who used to be pretty much normal citizens that used their youtube
accounts to gain a massive fan following that is almost similar to what you
would see with a boy band fandom. The Youtuber, Jon Kosart has a very fun and
interesting that explains this fairly well. Here is his video “YouTube Culture”
Video bloggers are not
the only people getting famous from youtube, there has also been a lot of
people who have risen to fame by putting out cool covers of popular songs. But
the real question here is, Is this beneficial to the creativity of the new
generation? We explore this more in this week’s edition of “I’ve Got You Covered”.
Let’s start with the
basics, who are these people making covers! This is actually a pretty easy one
because guess what? These are just regular everyday people. Some of the most
popular singing artists we have today started by putting covers on youtube.
Justin Bieber posted
this cover of “So Sick” by Ne-Yo 10 years ago.
The next 2 years he
continued to put these cover videos out on his YouTube channel which gave him a
massive fan following. He was eventually discovered by Usher, offered a
recording contract, and the now he is one of the most well known pop singers of this generation. Shawn Mendes has a similar story. He
was discovered by the covers that he put on the internet, and he now has a huge fan following. This is the story for
so many of these artists that we love today, and the one thing that links them
all together is that they got their start by putting out covers on YouTube.
The YouTube cover
culture has gotten to intense as of lately that there are complete channels and
people who do no original work and that produce only covers. Some examples of
these are The Piano Guys, Boyce Avenue, The Pentatonix, and Alex Boye. These artists have made a name for themselves
by essentially making another person’s song their own. Honestly YouTube sounds like a paradise for
people to listen to a new version of their favorite songs, but is it doing
really anything to encourage the creativity of these artists? This is where the
whole YouTube culture gets a little bit muddy.
It seems like YouTube
acts as just this constant spring board for others to go off of. One person starts with an original idea such
as the cinnamon challenge shown here and people create a million different
variations in order to gain subscribers or look like they are down with the
times.
This is also true for
the cover aspect of YouTube. Whenever a new song or album comes out there is
always a myriad of covers that come out right after that ride the popularity
high of the original song itself. For
example, the song “Hello” by Adelle came out about a year and a half ago and if
you search “Hello by Adele Cover” on YouTube you will find 9,320,000 results
with almost all of them being within the first few weeks of the song release.
This was honestly very interesting to me so I gave some a listen and I didn’t really
hear much variation from the original song which is brilliant in its vocal
technique. From this analysis it would
seem like these YouTubers have abandoned their own sense of creativity and
jumped on the bandwagon of just tweaking a small amount of the song to make it
sound just a little bit different, but it really does nothing to effectively
change the song. It would be very
interesting to see how Youtube culture would change if people were not allowed
to cover songs and had to rely on their won mind to create original music. Based
on these observations, I think that the copying verbatim culture surrounding the
YouTube realm is causing a detriment to creativity in this new age of media.
Now don’t get me wrong,
I am all for enjoying covers and I think that they can definitely cause you to
look at a song in a different light that inspires new ideas and ways of
listening to it, but purely singing along to the same track as the original
song is not doing that. I think that the YouTube culture is coming from a place
of wanting to be accepted and staying on trend instead of looking for a way to
express their creative energy.
I am very interested on
what you all have to say about this, so if you have an opinion on the culture
or meaning behind YouTube covers please comment under this post and if not don’t
worry about it fam.
Although this post was
just a tad bit different than my usual ones, I think it hit on some pretty
important points as far as upholding creativity. As always remember that if you
ever need anything, I’ve Got You Covered.
Thanks for listening and have a great week!
Mary Ashley
