Is This What YouTube Is Becoming?

[Homeless Nutter]

We not only have Let's Plays... where people play video games and you watch people playing them. And some people enjoy it so much that they prefer watching people playing video games to playing video games themselves....

We not only have reaction videos where people react to shocking videos and stuff.......


We now have....... a guy who has songs recommended to them and he listens to them for the first time......... so the video is him with headphones enjoying the song for the first time.......!?!??!??!?!

Is this what YouTube is becoming? LOL
[...]

Uhm, no. You're a couple of years late to the party, it seems. Reaction videos - of all kinds - were fairly prominent, popular and controversial for a while, but YouTube has mostly moved on since then. They will always be around, in one form or another, but that's YouTube - there's everything on there.

I think it's pretty obvious why some people watch these videos - haven't you noticed, that the songs the guy is listening to are being played in the background, together with video in a corner? It's the exact same thing, as videos of people reacting to popular YouTube videos, or whatever - instead of searching for stuff one might like among millions and millions of gigabytes of uploaded content, many people prefer to find an aggregating agent - a person with tastes similar to their own, who will regularly show them what's worth watching, listening to, or playing.

The reason reaction videos were controversial was because most reaction channels would essentially steal content they were reacting to, by showing it in a corner of their own videos. I think a lot of those channels were hit with copyright strikes and they had to adapt - which is difficult because pretty much NOBODY wants to watch a reaction, without seeing/hearing the material in question at the same time. So most of the biggest "reactors" moved onto other type of content, or disappeared.

I don't know how this guy gets away with it, especially that music is one of the easiest things for YouTube's copyright bots to detect. Perhaps his channel is too small for anyone to bother shutting him down. Or perhaps many musicians (especially those less widely known) accepted, that any publicity is good publicity. While most YouTube videos you only watch once, music you like you're likely to want to listen to again, so if you hear a song on a reaction video, you might then buy it, or find it on Spotify - and perhaps become a fan and long-time supporter of the artist. Most musicians nowadays can't afford to be overprotective of their copyright, because music is so easily available online, that it's pretty much worthless.