Aux-In

I have been on various forums for a good while now, and I just wanted to note a few suggestions on ways in which we can share content to where it will actually be there x number of years from now, instead of being lost to history because it got deleted for reasons we all probably know about. That's the idea, anyway.

Find official content: What tends to happen with YouTube videos is that they get moved, deleted, set to private, and so on, even if they are on official outlets. This has the affect of disabling any YouTube video links a forum poster adds when he/she is writing about a topic(s). Mostly, though, these videos are getting deleted due to copyright. The majority of content I listen to isn't on a Vevo channel, so when I come across a new song in an unofficial mix on an unofficial channel, I know that at some point that mix is likely to get deleted, or the entire channel ends up getting deleted due to copyright. Knowing this, I then take it upon myself to try as hard as possible to find an official upload, whether that be on the original artist's channel, the label's channel, or some sort of other recognized/official uploader and/or promoter. I do this even if a different uploader adds better value to the song via a cool background, fancy video, or the fact that they've uploaded the full version instead of a stupid radio edit. I know, I know: "Cool background? It's about the music anyway, bro." And it certainly is, which is why I think it's important to take the necessary steps to find the proper content.

Searching: Given the above, I try to search on the artist's YouTube channel for the song directly in question. If they don't have one, I try to find the label's channel, or Vevo if the artist is big/mainstream enough to have one. If I can't find it there, I try to search on Soundcloud, but that's not as ubiquitous as a YouTube video. Other people might recommend Spotify, but I have no experience with that service.

Example: Is the song available on any of the following?:

Artist's YouTube: No
Label's YouTube: No
Vevo: No
Soundcloud: Yes

Because the only official upload is available on Soundcloud, I would choose that link over any other unofficial link. Some sites have Soundcloud embedding, some don't. I used to want to choose the video with the better background, but I've since stopped doing this because I want that guy or girl five years from now to be able to play a video I posted and relate it to the write-up I did about it. Let's face it, I'm not going through all this trouble to present undiscovered material on Internet forums just to have that negated due to these issues. With that beef noted, I don't mind going out of my way to find the official content, especially if I believe in the music being created, or that it spoke to me in some way.

YouTube Auto-Generated Channels: From what I reasonably assume (this is nothing more than an educated guess), YouTube is trying to help provide official content by adding channel names via randomly-generated searches, otherwise known as YouTube - Topic channels. YouTube has a page discussing it, but it's not in depth at all -- very sufacey and nontransparent. As it were, they look like this:

Artist A - Topic

or

Artist B - Topic

The - Topic channels are more of a compilation of different things, even non-music related, and this is all based off your searching history or the history of multiple searches of a similar topic. Basically, YouTube is auto-creating these channels without a human at the helm.

YouTube is also using the pound key in front of the artists' names for content that is licensed to them by the artists themselves, or their labels. It looks like this:

#Artist A

or

#Artist B

Using Nirvana as an example, there would be two different auto-generated channels that look like this:

Nirvana - Topic

or

#Nirvana

I'm not entirely clear on how it all works, but both are different systems that basically do the same thing. The # videos look to be song-specific, and these are then linked to the #Nirvana account.

For example, I search for Nirvana's "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle."


I can tell immediately that none of the videos on the first page are official uploads. What I'm going to do now is add a pound sign in front of the title I just typed:

#Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle


The page still looks essentially the same, however, what this will do is help you find the video content that is licensed to YouTube by the whoever the rights-holder(s) is/are. It's not until I get to page three in the search results that I find the #Nirvana channel that tells me this: "Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group International." Now I at least have a greater certainty that this song will remain available, as it was legitimately provided to YouTube by the label. All of the # videos have this similar look where the background is faded.


Generally, this is useful when you can't find official content via an artist, label, or through Vevo. Now, let's say that the label ends up going under in a few years or the license expires and the videos get deleted anyway. That's okay, because a unofficial video is vastly more susceptible to being deleted due to copyright than a label going under or YouTube losing a license.

These are observations based on my experience with posting musical content on forums. Add yours if you wish.

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