YouTube Musicians and a Pathway from Fandom to Empowerment
/In 2007, I was a K-12 music teacher in Northern Illinois when one of my students told me about this amazing website that had a ton of music videos that I could watch for free. Of course, the video-sharing website he wanted to show me was YouTube, the site with the slogan “Broadcast yourself. Watch and share your videos worldwide!” The site instantly provided me with listening and learning examples for my students to enhance their time in my classroom. Not only could I find random choir performances of the music I had programmed to have my students go home and practice with, but I also pulled inspiration from the ways people were converging culture [see Henry Jenkins’ 2006 book about convergence culture where he discusses the various ways grassroots creators mashed up commercially-produced media with their own content during the early 2000s] to propel my students into new ways of creating. Projects in my classroom included creating cover music video performances, re-scripting and composing new music for movie trailers, developing picture montages of their favorite pop culture idols featuring music curated by my students, and filming documentaries about Black History Month for which students wrote scripts and chose music that exemplified their messages.
The YouTube Effect
In 2008, I went back to university to pursue higher education degrees and embarked on researching YouTube and the various ways musicians used the platform to interact with music. My master’s thesis, which eventually manifested in an article entitled “The YouTube Effect: How YouTube Has Provided New Ways to Consume, Create, and Share Music” (Cayari, 2011), was a case study that looked at a teenage musician, Wade Johnston, who was one of the pioneers of multitracking in the early days of YouTube. Multitracking is the practice of layering audio tracks on top of one another to create a song. What Wade did was not uncommon in the music recording industry. Commercial artists like David Byrne, The Carpenters, Michael Jackson, and Enya are all known to “dub” their own vocals and play multiple instruments on their studio recordings. Multitrack recordings abound on YouTube, and if you’d like to see how the art form evolved, watch A History of Virtual Choirs: A documentary about online singing.
Wade created his YouTube videos by himself in the comfort of his childhood home or dorm room. He had a “wing it” mentality where he sat down to record and added tracks until he was happy with the product. The resulting recordings were quite complex for the time, especially for a 19-year-old on a MacBook. Wade figured out how to use free software like iMovie and Audacity to create videos that went viral (see Figure 1 below).
FIGURE 1: ANALYSIS OF A MULTI-TRACK yOUTUBE MUSIC VIDEO
Wade’s work exemplified how YouTube was changing the ways musicians could share their music with others and develop a following. The affordability of technology made hardware and software available to the masses that were previously restricted to professional studios. As an academic, inspired by his story, I made the bold claim:
“YouTube is an art medium; a technology which allows listeners to become singers, watchers to become actors, and consumers to become producers creating new original works and supplementing existing ones. It allows everyone to have a voice that can be heard and a face that can be seen. YouTube is constantly pulling for viewers’ attention and entertainment.”
Musical Cover as Fan Activity
Online media platforms are so prevalent in our lives that most people are hard pressed to find someone who hasn’t created some form of media content, which can range from text in the form of life status updates on Facebook to pictures of well-plated meals on Instagram to trendy dancing videos on TikTok. Many musicians utilize social media sharing platforms to develop a following by publishing covers of popular music artists and other popular media. This helps them connect to an already established audience or fandom. Even though Wade wanted to share his original works, he found that popular chart toppers brought more viewers to his channel than songs he wrote himself. For example, a cover of I’m Yours by Jason Mraz brought hundreds of thousands of views to his channel. For a time, his cover was suggested more than the original commercially produced music video. The tactic of playing covers to build an audience is common; just think of all the bands you see at bars or in garage concerts, which is well documented in How Popular Musicians Learn by Lucy Green (2002). While Wade chose songs that he thought would do well with his audiences, many YouTube creators situate their creation within their favorite fandom.
Carlos Eiene, who is known as Insaneintherainmusic on YouTube, started his YouTube channel by publishing covers of his favorite video game music (VGM). The VGM fandom was fertile ground for Carlos, who was passionate about sharing his loves for jazz, video game music, and playing saxophone. He published over 100 music videos in his first year on YouTube, actively talked to others in online chatrooms and forums, and even encouraged his viewers to join him socially and musically through virtual ensembles and on his Discord. If you’re interested in hearing his story, check out my documentary about How a Middle School Band Kid Created an Online Musical Empire.
Carlos exemplified fanception, a word I used to describe the phenomenon of a fandom existing within a fandom (Cayari, 2020, p. 397; read more at Fanception and Musical Fan Activity on YouTube). Carlos existed within the VGM fandom. He created content and gathered his own group of fans, who in turn developed their own fandom of raindrops. Raindrops not only contributed to a community and fandom around Carlos’s content by interacting with him and each other on other social media but also attended live meet-ups at conventions and concerts.
Giving Back to Others through Mentorship
Since I’m an educator, I’m fascinated about how musicians who produce content online learn. I was ecstatic to find that many online content creators found that music classes and informal learning online worked in tandem to set them up for success. If you’d like to watch or read more about helpful learning strategies used by musicians who publish online, click one of the above links (Cayari, 2022).
Since many people learn about how to publish music online through informal music learning online—which includes, but is not limited to, reading texts, watching videos, asking questions of others on social media, and playing along with recordings, whether they be tutorials or commercially produced music—they often evolve their online presence from consumer to creator to, what I want to call here, contributor. (We all love alliterative lists.) As veteran creators, they contribute to the online community (whether that is of generic YouTube creators, affinity groups that focus on specific fandoms, or their own cultivated online gathering space) beyond just publishing their original and derivative content. For example, Carlos started developing communities in which others could learn from him and each other. He longed to create an affinity space at the intersections of jazz, video games, and music making. He helped teach others through tutorials, advice videos, and texts. This is a common trend for musicians on YouTube, as fans often ask, “How did you do that?” These creators like to give back to their communities by pulling back the veil of creation, thus inspiring a new generation of creators.
Since the end of my research time with Carlos, he has moved away from covering other people’s works to focusing on producing original content he makes as a composer, songwriter, and improviser. Making covers of other people’s content is great for finding fellow fans and then developing one’s own fanception-driven following. However, it comes with some challenges. For example, many of my research participants have discussed how they end up appeasing their audiences rather than focusing on the music that brings them the most meaning, joy, or fulfillment. It’s a delicate balance between focusing on entertainment and aesthetics. Additionally, producing covers is much less profitable than publishing original work because of royalties, copyright strikes, and revenue sharing. Many amateur/hobbyist research participants I’ve spoken with focus on covers, as they exist within an established fandom, while research participants who are professional musicians tend to have a pivot point where they pursue original works, rather than reproducing music composed by others.
Finding Empowerment through Musical Self-Reflection
While this pivot doesn’t have to be an exclusive decision where an artist only publishes original works and no covers, the focusing on one’s own music often requires self-reflection: a musical mindfulness, if you will. Additionally, when an artist focuses on their own music, they seem to find their musical “voice.” And, I’m not writing about voice as the ability to make sound, but the sense of autonomy that empowers one to share their beliefs, thoughts, and experiences. You might imagine how scary it could be for an artist with hundreds of thousands of followers online when they decide to move from a mindset of making audiences happy and delighting in shared interests to creating music based on their life experiences and personal aesthetics, especially if their music centers around their identity as a person from a marginalized or disenfranchised community. After all, many people believe the comment sections of social media platforms to be toxic, angry spaces where trolls abound. However, online forums and comment sections can also be places that help communities express themselves, find other likeminded individuals, and develop a support system of parasocial relationships. Amie Waters is an exemplar of someone who used her YouTube channel to share parts of her identity through the music she composed and produced.
Amie was most well-known for her VGM covers, which featured tracks of synthesizers, guitars, voice, and other random instruments. She also produced original works that were often one-off recordings intermixed in a sea of covers. In 2018, Amie released an EP online called Bisexual Space Magic as a coming out event. She found the process empowering because she was able to share the music she wrote about her journey in life. Many of her fans on social media loved the music and encouraged her to be authentic and keep producing the music she wanted to create. During the development and release of the EP, Amie realized she was trans, and the music in her studio started to evolve. She had worried about sharing that aspect of her identity with not just family and friends, but also her online community, opting to continue using her birthname. However, social media was integral in helping her find inspiration, support, and empowerment. Observing her YouTube channel helped me see an evolution of physical, visual, and emotional changes through her musical performance: wearing gender-affirming clothing; changes in the hair on her body, face, and head; and even the colors of lighting and audio-visual editing effects. She used text, visual cues, and music to come out, testing the waters of her audiences by moving from her smaller, more intimate platforms to the social media on which she had the largest number of followers. She first came out on Twitter, then her blog, and finally on YouTube. She worried that she would lose patrons (those who support her financially for the content she publishes online). However, that was not the case. While she did see a dip in subscriber count after coming out, all of her former-followers left quietly, and she was overwhelmed by the positive support from her audiences. She soon released an album called Cosmos of the Soul, a ‘synthwave space odyssey,’ in the form of an instrumental queer space opera that told the story of her sexuality and gender journey. If you’d like to read or watch more about how Amie became a Trans Synth Queen, click on one of the above links.
Expanding Music through Social Media
It excites me to talk to amazing YouTube creators and learn about how they learn music and publish art on social media. Many of my participants have shared that they piece together their education from institutionalized learning (school and university courses) and online resources. Yet, the challenge is that the venues of learning are often siloed. A commonly held option in the 2000’s and 2010’s was that people pursing musical careers should stay away from publishing their work on YouTube, assuming that self-produced creations would haunt a professional musician later on in life (for more about the relationship between Music Education and Informal Learning in the YouTube Era, click on the link or watch the video below). I’m so glad that many of my colleagues and I are working hard to help students gain skills in the classroom that set them up to be life-long music makers aided by the resources and tools that proliferate online. After all, when I visit elementary classrooms and ask kids what they want to do when they grow up, pop star and violin player are nowhere near as popular as TikTok dancer and musical influencer. So, I’ll keep my eye out for how musicians are using media and technology in fascinating ways so that I can help teachers and students learn more about creating media in 2022 and beyond.
Citations
Cayari, C. (2011). ‘The YouTube effect: How YouTube has provided new ways to consume, create, and share music.’ International Journal of Education & the Arts, 12(6), 1-28, http://www.ijea.org/v12n6/
Cayari, C. (2020). ‘Fanception and musical fan activity on YouTube.’ In J. Waldron, K. Veblen, & S. Horsley (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning, 395-415, New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Cayari, C. (2022). Learning strategies of video game music makers: Informal and school-based learning for online publication. International Journal of Music Education 40(3), 445–459, https://doi.org/10.1177/02557614211070037
Green, L. (2002). How popular musicians learn: A way ahead for music education. Bodman, UK: MPG Books.
Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide, New York, NY: NYU Press.
Christopher Cayari (he/they; DrCayari on Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram) is an associate professor of music at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. He holds a Ph.D. and M.M.E. in Music Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a bachelor’s degree in music education from Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, IL. Their research spans topics including, but not limited to, YouTube, identity, communities of practice, learning & teaching, race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, and musical & theatrical performance. His video research on music, video games, and social media can be found on this YouTube playlist.
