YouTube Wasn't Created As A Music Service, We Turned It Into One

Intelligent entrepreneurs typically don’t go into business without having an idea of what the end goal looks like and how they are going to get there. Things don’t always go as planned, but having a solid roadmap is important. Now, sometimes things happen along the way that are significant enough to change the direction of the company. If you’re finding success somewhere you didn’t initially think you would, don’t shy away. Embrace it.

This is exactly what happened with YouTube, and their ability to roll with the success that came their way and adapt has not only changed their fortunes, but the world. The site was not created as a music platform, but in only a few years, it has become the world’s number one streaming service—much bigger than Spotify or Pandora by far. So, if they company didn’t set out to be a revolutionary (and sometimes controversial) leader in the music industry, how did they get there?

It all happened organically, thanks to their “customer base”. The people made YouTube what it is today, and now the company, which has more than embraced its status, is getting ready to take things to the next level with their streaming service, the Music Key.

The disappearance of music videos on television and the rise in YouTube’s prominence are tied to one another in chicken-and-the-egg fashion. Tuning into MTV to see your favorite band’s new clip became less and less important as people began to realize that it would be online soon. In turn, people turned to the web and began to rely on it, so music videos simply didn’t bring in the same number of viewers as they used to, which only encouraged programmers to play fewer and fewer of them.

In a fairly short period of time, YouTube became the go-to place to watch music videos, all without ever really trying to be...and then it took on another life entirely. YouTube wasn’t just a website where you would upload music videos and watch them accumulate views (though they did, by the billions), it was a place for fans to take the music they loved by the artists they adored and make it their own in a multitude of ways. Everyone with a guitar and a microphone could create acoustic covers of today’s biggest hits, which both built up the profile of the original song and helped bring talents like Justin Bieber to the attention of bigwigs in the music industry.

Soon anyone could do almost anything they wanted with a smash, from covering or remixing it to mashing it up with other hits and using these songs in videos that had nothing to do with the track itself. Everyday users are also responsible for the lyric video, which was created essentially out of impatience. Especially creative fans would grab an artist’s new song the instant it hit the web (which increasingly became before it was actually supposed to thanks to rampant leaks in the industry) and make their own art based solely around the words. Now, the lyric video has become a serious medium, with the biggest artists on the planet investing in bigger and better ones as time goes on. MTV now even awards a trophy for the best one at their Video Music Awards, even though they don’t air them!

YouTube is getting closer to finalizing their streaming service every day, and it has been an exceptionally bumpy road. The company had to deal with its fair share of information leaks and attacks by the press, plenty of which were unflattering. Has the process been messy? Sure, but that doesn’t mean the final product won’t be a worth it. In fact, perhaps the opposite.