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Thursday, March 23, 2017

What's the Deal with YouTube Culture?

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