YOUTUBE – 2016-2020
In the post-MTV era, YouTube has become an important venue for new artists, although the blizzard of posted videos makes this a daunting task to say the least. Barely a decade old, YouTube – the second most popular website on earth (after Google) – has ballooned to the point that 400 hours of new videos are being uploaded every minute (as of February 2017). According to Wikipedia: “It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.”
Justin Bieber is the most successful musician to get his start on this video hosting service; a talent scout with So So Def Records clicked onto one of his videos on YouTube by accident in 2008, and he began singing for Usher shortly thereafter when he was just 13. Besides selling more than 100 million records, Wikipedia reports: “[Justin] Bieber also became the first artist to surpass 10 billion total video views on Vevo.”
Other YouTube stars include Carly Rae Jepsen (whose song “Call Me Maybe” became the best-selling single of 2012), the innovative a cappella group Pentatonix, James Bay, and Ed Sheeran.
(June 2017)
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Also on tap this coming year is an overview of New Wave Theatre, a fascinating public-access show that presented LA-area punk rock bands amongst other assorted weirdness that would air at the end of the popular late-night program Night Flight on USA Network. I have poked around on the Internet, and even though all of the episodes are now available on YouTube, not much has been written about the show – the Wikipedia article on New Wave Theatre has basically two or three paragraphs. Thus, I am going to have to do some primary research before I can get this post put together. I do plenty of that with the UARB’s and UARA’s, but for the remainder of the posts, I typically lean on Wikipedia and Allmusic. In other words, that is something else that I have been putting off. I had always hoped to at least keep this up for at least 10 years, but I am not there yet.
(Year 8 Review)
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I also recently picked up Thomas Anderson’s The Moon in Transit, another amazing album. Only heard that one once so far. The name is similar to that of the first album of his that I got, the Marilyn Records album Moon Going Down. When I put up the “Flashback” on Thomas Anderson five years ago, I could not find any songs at all on YouTube; I had to settle for listing lyrics instead. There are lots of his songs on YouTube now. Also, Thomas Anderson is one of the few UARB’s and UARA’s that has a Wikipedia article currently. (Another time, I ordered two more albums by a Thomas Anderson, not knowing whether it was the right guy or not. One of them, Is This Love? turned out to be a different Thomas Anderson, and I assumed that was true of the other CD as well. However, I discovered last month that the other one, Heaven is another great record by the right Thomas Anderson, so that’s four albums of his that I have now!)
(Year 10 Review)
