I agree on this. Oora seems like a super nice guy but he has an insane hardware addiction and has possibly won the lotto to afford it all. He makes ambient and soundtracks so it doesn’t really help me gauge a piece of gear, since I don’t do that. It comes off as a hardware fetish channel where he is justifying all this gear he has.
RMR seems like a serious drama queen. His reviews are excellent though, but his hyper personality is a lot.
Honestly I dialed down a lot of those types of gear pusher channels (they rail against pushing gear but continue to push it anyway) and seek out producers who just make great tracks or have great ideas on how to make great tracks. So for me, that is a lot of Ableton Live related stuff where I find techniques I may not have thought of.
It has gone downhill. Especially now that many creators have given in and are publishing low effort vertical shorts. They also frequently re-advertise their videos in youtube social posts.
Both of these I just don’t want in my feed, but there is no easy way to remove them. It just makes an enjoyable passtime feel tiring. (I subscribe to Youtube Premium so don’t get platform ads.)
The same old DistroKid and TrackLib ads are tiring too. I’ve been tuning out a lot lately for these reasons.
OK, glad I am not crazy, sometimes I feel like maybe I am just being overly grumpy. I usually come to the defense of youtuber’s, but it has just gotten so bad lately.
Yes, this is definitely the way to go. I imagine ableton videos would be good for this, but I don’t use ableton and use a lot of hardware. Which makes it a bit more difficult to find the good stuff. I really love when someone does the same technique a couple of different ways (daw and hardware for example, like the felix fleer videos I mentioned).
My enjoyable pastime used to be podcasts, I used to listen to a TON of podcasts, but they all, I mean every single one of them, turned to total trash during the pandemic (and a little bit before if I’m being honest) and they have never recovered. Watching ‘reply all’ crash and burn so bad was almost surreal lol, like watching someone get into a car crash with themselves in slow motion. I haven’t listened to a podcast episode for like 6 months. I also have youtube premium, no way I could handle the ads otherwise, but it is still starting to feel tiring, you are right. And the cost has gone up from $4.99 /month when I first subscribed to $24.99 /month on my last few credit card statements. I guess this is part of the enshittification process Dymaxion mentioned.
Jameson Nathan Jones is my favourite YouTuber right now. The right combination of humour and great tips. What’s more he is a pretty great musician as well.
Worst one has to be Synth Punk! Wow! Great collection of synths though!
I agree and i think it’s like the music industry. When artists are getting bigger they have other problems and goals in life. Same with some of the youtubers.
But there’s still a lot of good music out there, you just have to search for it. Same with youtubers. A lot of cool people doing their thing, you just have to find them.
A friend has been putting out some brilliant stuff with a Linnstrument and an RC-505 lately. He’s one of the few people I’ve seen who can really play the Linnstrument well.
Much of the content I follow is on specific areas of expertise like Crime Pays, Botany Doesn’t that will never really be great at broad searches, but do their own thing and patreon.
The algorithm is fucking brutal, every channel who does critical essays seems to have their own experience, but your Youtube homepage is no longer your subscribed, it provides you with a very small subset of videos (and not only what you’ve subscribed to!) if you don’t get enough clicks on your videos from that homepage, your rank drops.
It’s definitely not maintainable, not to mention the obvious mental health toll it takes to keep up with that cadence, not to mention having to now optimize for “shorts”… it’s draining bullshit and the amount of energy put into SEO optimization instead of content is definitely enough to break a person.
There’s not enough interesting topics to spam with that frequency and release schedule without leaning into the parasocial or doing bullshit like curating for micro-trending.
I think there’s some nuance when it comes to understanding what is popular, i’ve heard essayists like SuperEyepatchWolf suggest that trends don’t drive which topics they’re interested in, but if they have to choose between two already deep and interesting stories, they can use clickthrough to judge which might be more viewed/“successful” towards general retention.
I can dig that attempt at reducing choice paralysis at least.
