The 5 Characteristics Of The YouTube Voice

We've all either experienced or heard of the teenage (or just beyond) YouTube sensations that have millions of followers and hundreds of millions of views, but is there something that's common between them? Business and presentation aside, The Atlantic attempted to find out by asking a few linguists to determine the characteristics of a "YouTube voice." Here's what they discovered.

1. Overstressed vowels: Emphasizing a vowel that would normally pass loosely in the middle of the mouth.

2. Extra vowels between consonants: Elongating a word by adding an extra syllable to it so it's emphasized. The name for this is epenthetic vowel.

3. Long vowels: Stretching out vowels is another common way of emphasizing words, but sometimes they're just only slightly longer than normal.

4. Long consonants: Especially those at the beginning of words.

5. Aspiration: From the article - “If you put your finger in front of your mouth, I'll teach you a very quick phonology lesson,” Baron said. I did. “Are you ready? Say ‘keep.’”
“Keep.”
“Now say ‘geep.’”
“Geep.”
“When you said keep, did you feel a breath of air on your finger?” She asked. (Indeed I did.) “That’s called an aspiration.” There’s normally an aspiration on the K, even if you say it normally, but if you huff and puff a little more, that makes the word stand out."

The “YouTube voice” is just a variety of ways of emphasizing words, but they're actually things that people do all the time. YouTube vloggers need to keep the viewer's attention, so they do them a little more.

It's interesting, though, that one linguist called it an "intellectual used-car-salesman voice."

Check the original article for some great examples. Could this be something that you can include in your YouTube videos?

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Even In Music It's The Top 1%

Most streaming and download music services have more than 20 million songs available, which should be more than enough for any one lifetime of music discovery. But music discovery isn't something that most people seem to be interested in, at least according to the numbers quoted in an article on The Atlantic.

• First of all, the top 1% of bands and solo artists now earn 80% of all the revenue from recorded music. That's pretty depressing.

• But it gets worse. The 10 most popular songs accounted to almost 2% of all streams in both 2013 and 2014. That means that 1 in ever 50 to 60 streams on Spotify, Soundcloud or YouTube will be a top 10 song.

• A typical listening session is around 3 1/2 hours, but no matter how musically cutting-edge you are, there will still be at least one top 10 song in the playlist.

The fact of the matter is that some people love to discover new music, but most people don't actively take the time to do so and would rather be spoon fed by radio or some other passive service. That means that social buzz means more than ever to a new artist. You can make new music, but the world isn't going to beat a path to your door to hear it.

Music Stores Take The Biggest Hit

Reader Scott Culley turned me on to this article in The Atlantic about the decrease in retail jobs in the United States.

The most interesting point is driven home by the chart on the left. The part of retail hit the hardest is music stores, as you can see in the very last point on the left side of the graph.

Now keep in mind that this also encompasses stores that sold CDs, which have been virtually driven out of existence since the emergence of digital music, as well as mom and pop retail musical instrument stores as well.

The point is that the music business has felt the hit on so many other levels than just the artist and record label in the last ten years. They may not have been great jobs, but they were jobs all the same.

Management Secrets Of The Grateful Dead

It's quite popular to believe that the hippie movement of the 60's was only about sex, drugs and rock and roll, but you'd be surprised that many of the core principles of social networking and Music 3.0 were promoted back then by the pied pipers of that movement - the Grateful Dead.

Indeed, it's now believed that the Dead were visionaries in providing what we today call "customer value," social networking (but real human social networking), and strategic planning that might rival that of today's MBA's, this according to a recent article in The Atlantic.

The band has just donated their 40 years of archives to University of California Santa Cruz, primarily because one of its professors, Frederic Lieberman, is a Dead scholar and teaches a course about them at the school. But if you think that's a curious musing at a notedly eccentric college campus, think again. Even an organization as esteemed as The New York Historical Society will open an exhibit of the Dead's archive's this week, and more and more universities around the country are instituting Dead courses of their own.

So what of the band's business vision? They were smart enough to incorporate early on, then established a board of directors with a rotating CEO position, something that many corporations could learn from today. And it wasn't just the band members who were on the board. All the members of their organization, including the road crew, were made an integral part of the company.

They were one of the first bands to understand the value of merchandising and founded a sales and licensing division that was not afraid to sue anyone who violated their copyrights. And they were one of the first acts to permit fans to tape their shows, understanding that fans sharing tapes would widen their audience, just as digitally pirated music does today. As a result, the Grateful Dead eventually became one of the most profitable musical acts of all time, despite having relatively meager album sales compared to those of their contemporaries.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that the business techniques of the Dead would be considered hip, but yet, here we are.