Thursday, April 2, 2015

Big Data Picks This Year's YouTube Music Awards Honorees

YouTube Music Awards image
We seem to be awash in awards shows these days, and most of them feel like they're packaged especially for TV viewing rather than to honor the nominees (as evidenced by the recent iHeartRadio awards). In fact, many times the winners and performers are picked by anonymous "voters" who just happen to select the acts that are the most popular at the moment and also have the largest potential viewer attraction.

The YouTube Music Awards may be another me-too award, but at least it's selecting its winners in a more modern way - by letting the data do the talking.

The awards event will recognize the site's 50 biggest artists based on the views, subscribers and engagement over the last 6 months on Youtube, which is a pretty good general indicator of popularity.

Among the 50 honorees include artists that you'd probably expect like Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, One Direction, Ariana Grande, Beyonce, Hozier, Ed Sheeran, and Brad Paisley, but there's also some off-the-radar choices as well like Pentatonix and Lindsey Stirling, artists that are a product almost exclusively of YouTube.

That said, the 50 award honorees represent the cream of the music crop on the service, collectively garnering over 47 billion views (yes, that's with a "b") so far.

One thing that's going to be a lot different about this year's awards is that it won't consist of what we've come to know as a "show." Even though last year's awards show was anything but traditional in that it was largely one big improvisation (although it was eventually viewed more than 54 million times), this year the network has decided to forgo any vestige of the standard fare we've come to expect from such an event.

Instead, on March 23rd YouTube will receive a one day music makeover, complete with a number of exclusive videos produced by Vice Media. In the meantime, YouTube also has launched a channel just for the awards.

As with the previous YouTube Music Awards, the event is sponsored by Kia.


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1 comment:

Unknown said...

Sorry I a confused as to why the youtube way is better. You argue that the normal way is by anonymous voters that just happen to pick what is currently popular and that will attract a large audience.

Surely picking the winners by video views is doing exactly the same thing. These are the most watched videos which will almost exclusively be the popular artists of the time for the service.

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