Good music, a shy and coy mistress, has been avoiding me of late. That is to say, it is hard to come by. So I made the conscience decision to get off the beaten track and look for my own music, rather than wait for radios to drip feed me good tracks. My first port of call like most was the internet, a useful tool if you know what you’re looking for becomes the source of a mental breakdown if you don’t. Let’s just say I spent several very irate evenings sat in front of a computer typing and retyping different combinations of songs and artists to look for what others had professed to be the “best” music going. I then tried mix tapes, a pointless endeavour, basically a lot of beeps and whistles designed to build hype for an artist. But to be fair I did get a few tracks through these ways, and it did make me slightly savvier with the internet. I also tried collecting sound tracks to movies and TV shows, which worked slightly better, although I found that there isn’t much originality in Hollywood. Finally after exhausting the soundtracks of hundreds of TV shows and movies I decided I needed a new musical medium. A friend of mine had been harping on about YouTube being full of music, but, as you sometimes do, I ignored him out of a sheer contrariness that I had not discovered it myself.
YouTube was it, for those of you who haven’t discovered its delights; I hope I don’t turn you off it. It was like taking Last.FM, surprisingly useless for aimless browsing, and mixing it with videos, and comments and options. I could spend hours talking about its utility but the point of this article is to point you towards a source, often under represented, for new music. Searching is easy and covers every genre imaginable, cloud computing at its best. Before you say I’m a YouTube employee I’m not, but I am a convert to Youtubism. It introduced me to music I’m too young to have otherwise heard, music you can’t find anywhere else, or simply songs you would never have heard because you would not even know to look for it. Everything from mixes to remixes, originals to edited masterpieces combined with videos and pictures. So next time you’re on the internet and bored search for music on YouTube.
Jill Scott
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