The pros and cons of YouTube posting

Recently this week, a friend of mine showed me a YouTube exclusive artist, Tay Zonday. His first music video of “Chocolate Rain” was well received, if not blasted the hell out of by the sarcastic populous that is the planet Earth. The song itself is very deep and deals mainly with the plight of African Americans but, and this is straight from the comment board, “ok.....i got it.....quit music and go into voice-over work. cause your voice is very unique. u can be the next james earl jones. but seriously......STOP SINGING. please. make it stop!” By no means does it stop there; the criticism and general bad natured commentary on this song from beyond just the YouTube community is enough to make the Star Wars Kid go back to the mental institution. Tay has apparently accepted this stardom though and is using it to become a mildly successful singer via online word-of-mouth.

The issue I saw from this, and in fact most self made music video releases, is how seriously they can be taken. Music videos are a powerful medium to present a bands music and there is a huge demand from the TV community for these videos to be creative and to emphasize the song being presented. With bands like OK Go and Radiohead suddenly displaying creative and lower budget music videos free online, the industry suddenly has to take a long look at what people want now. With online sites like YouTube and MySpace allowing for music to reach a larger market more effectively than limited TV time, there is a sudden freedom in producing both music and the music video. The question now is how appropriate or helpful is it for an artist to release in an open domain like YouTube?

A plague of anybody with talent to perform is that their idiotic critics proverbially slap them down for reasons ranging along the lines of “I don’t get it. All it sounds like to me is a cat scratching on a chalk board.” I went tasteful with that, but the point is people can be difficult to impress. If a video suddenly becomes part of a public domain with open commenting, the music video could be trashed and shunned like most good things in life. Those videos that do make it are considered great, more for comedic value than any talent, which is disrespectful to the artists. In that aspect, posting can be a terrible thing and a harmful thing to the music community.

In the opposite spectrum, the mass distribution of music videos helps get the music out there. While Tay did get heavily criticized, he’s gotten his place among the stars, appearing on television on several occasions, and has even had stars like John Mayer take notice. The more obvious example of success can be seen in the OK Go music videos, which are considered some of the best viral videos and music videos of recent times and have given the band a huge fan base.

To sum it up though, I’ve seen a lot of positive things come out of artists posting online and it can only get better with the medium being used for its full potential. The online community is a very fickle audience though and with that, artists will need to be careful and be ready for an onslaught of ignorance, more so than with anything else.