Can I cover your cover? Media Experiment

In the world of academics, one would get into trouble if you were to copy or reproduce the work of another scholar. However does the same true for people on social media, especially musicians that do covers of certain songs? I would say no since many times we take inspiration from other talents and want to show our skills compared to other artist.

Social media is covered with many covers and sometime those covers get covered. It was interesting to see how one YouTuber (Sambadha) decided to recreate the guitar cover of a Taylor Swift song. Although Sambadha didn’t get as many views as the original, he receive more views than most of his other videos. The video wasn’t disliked nor was it very popular (given very few followers). I would argue that this would be the result of people wanting the original cover and although Sambadha covered Mateus quite well, this cover has already been done and didn’t have anything new.

In the book Reel World there was an argument suggesting that “creation is always a dialogue with the past, with the form and force of what already exists” (Pandian76). In other words I would say that many times we are influenced by other musicians, artist, photographers and we sometimes take inspiration from them to produce something “new.” I think that social media followers are always expecting something new from their idols in order to get inspiration or to get simply hit the like or share button.

I find this to be true even in my own account since in my free time I tend to try to recreate the song that I find on my Instagram account. Most of the time I can’t do it exactly as the person but I take bits and pieces from their 60 second video and I use in my own playing.

Overall I would say that people tend to better appreciate post that are original.

Pandian, Anand. Reel world: an anthropology of creation. Durham: Duke U Press, 2015. Print.