“Welcome to your world”: YouTube and the Reconfiguration of Music’s Gatekeepers

This chapter introduces the relationships, antagonisms and interactions between YouTube and musical cultures since 2005. Almost immediately upon its launch, the platform exerted a seismic influence on all corners of music making, from the music industry’s most commercially successful acts to grassroots, low-fi and DIY amateur practice; from composition, collaboration and innovation to funding, distribution and marketing; and from preservation, curation and remediation to the power relations of access and censorship. Through a consideration of music circulation, the music industry, music video, pedagogy, audience reactions, fandom, collaboration, accessibility, censorship and professional and DIY content, the chapter analyses the ways in which the platform has problematised and refreshed the traditional gatekeepers and intermediaries of contemporary music and explores the potentials for a new, crowd-sourced type of musicology.