As you may have read in my previous musings on the subject, the YouTube Music Awards (or the YTMA’s as it’s now being called) seemed like an ideal event to represent the best of the new music business. Or should have been. Here’s what we got during Sunday night’s extravaganza instead.
1. A show that was poorly viewed. The show was viewed by only 220,000 viewers at its peak, which is embarrassing for a platform the size of YouTube. The fact is that most of the performers alone could have done better numbers without the network’s help, which means that YouTube did a woeful job getting the word out.
Now think about that for a second - YouTube, which is the most powerful platform for discovering new music online, and which is owned by Google, arguably the most powerful of all Internet companies, could only generate 220,000 viewers! Even 10 times that amount would have been embarrassing. Just for comparison, the MTV VMA’s had a viewership of 10.1 million this year.
The interesting thing was that the YouTube Music Awards got a lot of coverage from the mainstream press, which clearly didn’t address the market that the show was aimed at. Shouldn’t a company so steeped in modern mass communication know better?
That said, the show did have a fair amount of social action, with over 300,000 tweets over the three hours before during and after the show. The problem here is that the tweet dropped off drastically when the show went live, which could have been from the fact that most viewers were watching on a phone or tablet, and it’s difficult to tweet and watch at the same time when you only have one screen. Read more on Forbes.
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