Online content creation is a very lucrative business, especially on YouTube. Due to the platform’s sheer versatility, it allows for a wide variety of different forms of content to be made and music is often one of these. While YouTube already has a wide variety of music channels already in existence, it isn’t rare to see other content creators who specialize in other forms of content to start producing music on the platform and nine times out of ten, the outcome isn’t great.
In the earlier years of YouTube, content creators made music that was clearly satirical, non-serious or intentionally dumb, such as “Doin’ Your Mom,” by the group Fatty Spins in 2009 for example. For a large majority of YouTube’s life, it didn’t seem like a possibility for anyone to start any semblance of a successful music career from YouTube.
However, in the mid to late 2010s, that viewpoint started to change, with content creators such as KSI for example, who would continue to make videos alongside his, rather mediocre, music. Another egregious example is Jake Paul, whose song “It’s Everyday Bro,” being as shallow and uninspired as it was, blew up on the internet. Even George Kusunoki Miller, who was known as Filthy Frank on YouTube, stepped away to become an incredibly successful music career under the name of Joji. This era of music on YouTube created waves of inspiration for many content creators, for better or worse.
Nowadays whenever content creators go into music, it often turns out to be shallow and messy, so much so to the point that it’s often hard to believe there was a team behind the music. An example being Dream’s “That’s What the Mask Is,” which the internet collectively clowned on or KSI’s “Thick of It,” which ended up sounding corny and cringe inducing. However, it’s not all black and white. There’s been various examples of good YouTube music that people found to be good, such as Jshlatt’s Christmas album “A Very 1999 Christmas.” Overall, YouTuber music is a very mixed bag, yet intriguing.
