YouTube recently announced its first ever Music Awards show. You will be available to stream the ceremony live from their website (which is still the world’s largest video sharing service) on the 3rd of November 2013. The ceremony itself will take place in New York and will be hosted by American actor and musician Jason Schwartzman (known for his roles in films like 1998’s Rushmore and 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom). YouTube has said that it will be a fan-powered celebration of music and artists and that the show will be headlined by Lady Gaga, Eminem and Arcade Fire.
The YouTube Music Awards show will also feature performances by Lindsey Stirling and CDZA (YouTube made arists). To put the emphasis on its global dominance in the video sharing realm, the award show will also include live acts from Seoul, Moscow, London and Rio de Janiero. The nominations will be announced on the 17th of October 2013 and will be based on the most watched and shared content on YouTube over the past year. Check out the promo video for the show below:
This announcement doesn’t come as a surprise to me. Thousands of artists from all over the globe have been increasingly using the YouTube platform to promote their music to millions of users over the last few years. One minute you could be someone doing a cover version of your favourite song in your basement or garage and the next you could be someone who may have their first recording contract in front of them. YouTube has also become a rich resource to discover new music. It’s no wonder that television viewership figures for channels like VH1 and MTV are on the decline. If you ask me it won’t be long before the amount of global YouTube users tops the amount of television viewers.
Remember the days before the internet? Remember watching more music videos than reality shows on MTV in the 1990’s? Well, those days are long gone and things certainly have changed since the rise of YouTube. Some of you may still think that YouTube is useful, but there have been many success stories like Cobus Potgieter, The Guild and Die Antwoord. The biggest musical success story of them all it has to be the Justin Bieber story.
Before he was making multi-million dollar music videos that get millions views Bieber started out by making videos of him singing songs (much to delight of his growing fan base). Since it was uploaded in May 2010 Justin Bieber’s video for “Baby Baby” has had over 906 million views on the platform (the 2nd most viewed video of all time on YouTube). Love him or hate him, but you have to respect and admire someone who started out as a nobody from Canada and now sells millions of records globally thanks to actively using YouTube the right way.
Make sure that you watch the YouTube website closely for updates about the first ever YouTube Music Awards. It will be interesting to see who walks away with the honors this year.
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