Every time I’m tempted to pay for the premium Youtube subscription, I recall the glossy magazines I used to subscribe to in the '90s. They were often 30-50% ads, but the ads were usually either aesthetically pleasing or informative. Ad revenue typically overshadows subscription by a large margin. The main thing subscription revenue does is indicate the presence of a live listener - who can be marketed to.
When you shop at a record store, you are already inside of an implicit algorithm. Are you in a city that has a good music scene? Are you in the right part of the city for good music, or are you in the tourist zone where everything is top-40 pop? Which record store do you enter? Which aisles do you walk down, and how do the stacks draw you in?
Youtube is a massive disorganized warehouse full of everything. It is Jorge Luis Borges’ Library of Babel, focused on A/V rather than text and currently under construction.
This forum is a great place to find high quality curated youtube content.
I think the answer is what it has always been throughout human history - like minded people gathering together to share the cool stuff they are into. There is a lot to dislike about Youtube, but the underlying forces at play are not new. They are just massively amplified and optimized.
One thing that makes me optimistic is that Google in 2021 feels a lot like Microsoft in 2001 - out of touch, uncool and full of internal morale problems. It took Microsoft a long time to pivot back to relevance.
One thing that makes me pessimistic is that the debt-based music industry (sign to a label, get an advance loan that you must pay back before you earn a penny for yourself) has managed to drag itself and it’s claws into the digital realm.
Good song, bad video. Dirty Loops is pretty fantastic imo, but I’d rather watch the music video than the “ermagerd mynd blewnnn” video of the music video.
I actually appreciate that he was doing the fake ASMR style, since the alternative would be screaming into the mic every time a chord changed.
9 times out of 10 I dislike reaction channels/videos. They’re piggybacking off of the hard work of those who made the original content without really adding much of anything else.
The remaining 1 time in 10 is The Daily Doug (he is knowledgeable enough about music to be able to break down what’s happening, music theory wise, and he doesn’t say anything stupid), and Nick Nokturnal (the above about the 9/10 applies to most of his videos, except that he’s usually semi entertaining about it. But I digress).
Now we just need to make a reaction video of the ‘Nauts reacting to the reaction video which was reacting to the music video.
My reaction video would have me sleeping soundly for a five minutes.
And as for click baity goofy face thumbnails and keywords in titles and all that crap, for my own YT channel I made sure everything I put up was crafted to avoid the YT algorithms. And to great success!
That’s what I used to use! had to install it from another dubious appstore called tweakbox but that stopped working plus it got revoked all the time and I’d have to reinstall it which may or may not work half the time lol. Will give the other method a go though, nice one
