It looks like someone has listened to me and finally created the YouTube Music Awards. For those of you who read my Music 3.0 blog, I postulated that the time was right for these awards way back on Sept 10, 2012. YouTube announced last week that it would throw it’s first awards show on November 3rd, with none other than Lady Gaga, Eminem, and Arcade Fire as the primary guests, with YouTube up and comers CZDA and violinist Lindsey Stirling also featured. The show will be broadcast (on YouTube naturally) live from Pier 36 in New York with Jason Schwartzman as the host, with as yet unannounced performances from Seoul and Moscow as well, nicely illustrating the global nature of the service.
Now I bet you just read that and thought, “Oh no, not another awards show,” and I wouldn’t blame you a bit for feeling that way. I can sympathize, but hear me out.
Television music award shows as we know them today are shams, with the judging based on loose criteria that seems to shift with the latest social media popularity trends. Let’s take a look at what we currently have.
MTV Video Music Awards? The channel doesn’t even play music videos anymore, so how are they qualified to award anything? The People’s Choice Awards? The final vote may be the people’s choice, but how about the nominations? Isn’t it interesting that you can name the nominees before they’re even nominated?
Then we have the Grammy’s. Having been a voting member (I’m not any longer), I can tell you that some of the more popular categories have literally hundreds and hundreds of nominees. When you’re voting your eyes start to glaze over just reading them all, let alone trying to listen to even a smattering. As a result, who do you think you end up selecting? The most popular and visible, not the most deserving. Even some of the smallest categories have 50 to a hundred, which means you have the same problem and the same result.
Perhaps the ultimate sham is the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Under what criteria does an act get nominated, then elected? Longevity you can measure, but influence? It all seems pretty vague and cloaked in secrecy. Personally I don’t believe there should be a music hall of fame, but if you were really going to do it right, design it like Major League Baseball where it’s based on some tangible numbers. That used to be sales, but now the only really numbers that count are YouTube video views.
Want a yardstick as to how this works? It used to be that a million views was considered substantial, but now that just barely gets you in the game. Hit 10 million? Now you’re making some noise, but it isn’t until you hit the 50 million mark that a song can truly be considered a hit, with most of the biggest hitting view counts far beyond 100 million. What’s more, that doesn’t even include all of the offshoot user-generated lyric and cover song videos that rake in tens of millions of additional and uncounted views as well. YouTube is truly the major criteria for measuring a song’s success these days, banishing all other measurements to secondary status.
And YouTube seems like it will do these awards the right way, limiting them to only seven categories (the categories and the nominees will be announced on October 17), because here’s the secret that no one talks about – superstars don’t need awards. They’ve got plenty of accolades already, and one more isn’t going to make or break them. But rising stars and breaking artists do need the recognition, so the hopes are that some successful (by YouTube standards anyway) but less visible artists will get their due as a result of this show.
Can the YouTube viewer system be gamed? Sure, but who do you trust more than Google GOOG -1.43% to figure that one out? There’s probably something in its mysterious search algorithm already that’s taken suspicious views into account. Besides, when we’re talking tens of millions of views, you would think that gaming the view count would become both extremely expensive and pretty obvious.
So let’s hear it for the YouTube Music Awards, an idea who’s time has indeed finally come.
