YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
YouTube disallowing adblockers, Reddit charging for API usage, Twitter blocking non-registered users. These events happen almost at the same time. Is this one of the effects of the tech bubble burst?
Absolutely. I was a big part of the non professional music production side of YouTube a decade ago. Imagine getting 100+ new songs every week, from talented artists putting everything they had into their work. It was incredible! This year I got into data hoarding and looked into downloading my old favorite songs… Turns out most of them deleted their old work from YouTube when they went pro or simply closed out their channel for personal reasons. Not even the compilation channels were still around. Hundreds of thousands of songs are just gone, along with the records of that community’s culture.
Not an amateur producer at all, but a few years ago I was listening to a lot of YouTube mixes while working. Lofi stuff might be cookie cutter elevator music to you, but I loved some mixes over others. I got attached to some of them, and discovered a ton of artists that way. These were single, long videos with many tracks each.
My heart sank when I started finding some of them turn into broken links. I figured out YouTube-DL and got to archiving. I found some reuploads of playlists I liked such as the wonderful Morning Coffee by the amazing SoulSearchAndDestroy (the lead song, damn fine coffee by mtbrd, is one of my favorite lofi tracks ever). Other playlists have been lost to time.
Sometimes I skim through my archived playlists to find a song I can remember in my head, and sometimes I don’t find the song, and it’s possible that I will never find it again. Again, silly for this to happen with lofi of all things (one of the most dispassionate and almost disposable genres of music).
I still think YouTube is unmatched for music discovery. Yes, you’re clicking on songs for “bad” reasons such as the thumbnail or recognizing the curator’s channel, but it worked pretty damn well for me.
7 years ago I got introduced to this really small local artist by a friend who had just a handful of songs on his YouTube channel, but they were all incredible. I could listen to music while I worked but it wasn’t super practical to have my phone out for it, so I always converted songs from YouTube to mp3 and downloaded them to put on my mp3-player. I did that with this artists songs as well. A few years later, I wanted to show another friend this music, and the whole channel was deleted. Sometimes I wonder if I and the artist itself are the only people who have a recording of his songs in the world.