Love’s been good to me
More than using YouTube to watch videos, I use it for music on demand. Nowhere else can I hear so many things on demand. I’m sure as Google continues their copyright crackdown, this will no longer be the case, but at the moment, I can dig up montage tributes to Johnny Cash and June Carter whenever I want. Also, I can scope out Carter’s totally amazing outfits, which seem to have wedded Bette Midler’s sense of color and texture with the modesty standards of the Little House on the Prairie era.
I think what’s most amazing about YouTube is that many of the bits of obscure television and concert footage are transferred from VHS, Beta and other non-digital media, and they have likely been in off-the-grid circulation for years. YouTube and other video hosting sites are a lot of fun, but part of what they seem to be doing is radically altering the shape of the bootleg market. Seeing what gets pushed back underground will be interesting.