Youtubeduplication

This was my favourite song of yesterday.

I knew nothing about the artist, Touch Sensitive. I heard it on a mixtape, tweeted it, and played in on repeat for an afternoon.

I noticed the clip only had a few hundred views, which I was a little surprised by. I searched the title again, and noticed about 10 other uploads. They all appeared to be the same song, yet were all hosted by different “music channels” with names like UpsideSounds and PlayitMusicOfficial. Some linked out to his Facebook, some didn’t. The main difference that I found was the cover image. Over the last few years these have evolved from a pixelated album cover or google image to a professional landscape shot.

The overbearing visual style of these ‘titles’ is a freak child of floating FFFFound debris and stock Instagram filters, often with the name of the channel reversed out in the middle. Not exactly ground breaking graphic design, and more often than not the original art goes uncredited.

But hey, they get hits. For Pizza Guy the views ranged from 1, to about 5000 views apiece, and with their powers combined totalled 11,000 views. That’s not even a big track. For popular songs like Bonobo’s single “Cirrus” you’re looking at about 30 individual uploads, a modest result when compared with upload poster child Lil Wayne.

Shitty artwork aside, these uploaders are just that, uploaders. They’re not remixing or covering the tracks. They’re not filming their own music videos, or scoring scenes. They’re not embedding music videos on their blogs and reviewing songs with the annoying dexterity of a lazy arts grad. They’re really just curating songs which they like, or think a lot of other people will like, share and listen to again. This raises a question; if curating is their game, why not just tweet links to official videos, or Spotify tracks?

If you clicked that FFFFound link before, you’ll come across a lot of inspiring artists. For me, as a designer, it’s an indispensable resource. But if you stick around for a while, you’ll also find a whole bunch of uncredited images, many times removed. Photographed tweets of reblogged iphone screenshots. These are relics of original creative work, spinning in an endless maelstrom of content.

“We’re walking through a fog of stylized imagery devoid of artists, explanations, and history.”

Credit is baked into Youtube because every video needs a title, and without tags no one will ever find it, but I doubt Touch Sensitive will ever have any true control of his songs. Once they’re loaded onto a ‘play all’ playlist, some of the listeners might never know who Touch Sensitive is.

A monetized forcefield (no not Bandcamp) would be nice, but until then, all your stuff is out there getting reposted, manually retweeted and uploaded with a photo of a model sitting in a park. So shut up and take it as a compliment.