Contrary to popular belief YouTube has had a much larger effect on society than being just a platform for people to post videos of keyboard’ing cats or reviews of Yankee Candles. YouTube has become an integral part of our everyday lives. What YouTube has done that is so remarkable actually involves little advancement in the actual process of recording/editing video. The way YouTube has changed life as we know it is providing the ability to share videos in a radical new way.
All of a sudden videos that barely anyone would be able to see now has the potential to easily reach hundreds and possibly thousands in a short amount of time. Videos from the past have become easily accessible & thousands of videos have been uploaded since you began reading this post. But it doesn’t stop there. The ability to embed videos in any website and record/watch them on mobile devices has expanded the capacity for sharing beyond a point that is very hard to conceptualize. What has been achieved is very easy to look over and most likely because of the speed at which this all happened. From it’s first video in April 2005 (Me at the zoo) to user-submitted questions being integrated into the GOP debates- YouTube has solidified itself in life as we know it.
One of the most affected parts of our our culture that YouTube has changed forever is obviously music. With my digital project I propose to curate a web exhibit that focuses on the different aspect of the music industry that has been changed forever because of YouTube. My project would likely take form of a blog like WordPress.com to host a series of posts focused on specific topics that include video examples & commentary (both my own & outside) to help put the affects in a more historical context.
I’ve decided on four subtopics to curate my posts around- many have different layers under them and some may change. They are…
- Copyright
- Loss of ownership
- Embrace of remix – Pogo
- Lenz v. UMG
- Birth of Vevo
- Discovery of Music
- How people discover music – embeding, blogs, etc.
- How bands/artists can be discovered
- Shortcut to celebrity – Justin Bieber
- Creation of the Pseudo video
- Affect on Past Music
- Ability to access a large amount of music at will
- See old concerts & interviews that were once extremely rare
- Affect on Live Music
- How people ‘view’ concerts
- Ability to see the show from last night
Sources
I’ve accumulated a healthy amount of articles to reference that hit on my subtopics from established publications like Wired to personal blogs.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAwR6w2TgxY]
I don’t know if it would be helpful, but have you heard of VidCon? (http://vidcon.com)
It’s essentially a Youtube conference, but put on by people who post user generated content. People who have become Youtube celebrities, for lack of a better term, usually attend, and a fair amount of them are musicians in some form or another. Hank Green (vlogbrothers), Charlie McDonald (charlieissocoollike), and Alex Day (nerimon) are just a few that come to mind; Hank Green even started his own record label, DFTBA Records. (dftba.com) It’s an interesting counterpoint to the Big Corporate Music industry.
Great project and great plan. I like how you have already put together an order and a structure to the project and I think modeling something on the sort of thing that Tom did last year is a great idea.
It would probably be good for you to take a gander at some of the scholarly work folks are doing on YouTube. I imagine it will provide you with some good fodder to weave into the exhibition.
So I would suggest:
– The YouTube Reader: http://www.youtubereader.com/
– Youtube: Online Video and Participatory Culture http://www.amazon.com/YouTube-Participatory-Culture-Digital-Society/dp/0745644791
– Learning from YouTube: http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/learningfromyoutube/
I would also suggest that you take a look at http://thru-you.com/ and look at some of the discussions around that work (ex: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2009/03/kutimans_thru-you_mashes_up_co.html ) I think this project ends up cross cutting a few of the parts of this that you are interested in.