Key Company Case Study

Certain media conglomerates/companies have become so successful they can be considered absolutely essential in determining how profitable an artist can become. With the popularity of the internet at its absolute peak, video sharing/viewing sites are paramount in an artists career. An example of this is Youtube.

What is Youtube?
YouTube is a website specifically created for the uploading/sharing/consumption of videos. It acts a distribution platform for content creators and advertisements. One popular form of videos to be uploaded to the site is music videos. Music videos generate billions of views and revenue which created profits for the artist and the site itself.

When was YouTube created?

The site was founded on February 14th 2005 by: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Here is the first ever video uploaded to YouTube featuring one of the creators (Jawed Karim) which has over 19 million views today.

Music videos on YouTube

Since the website was founded, artists/musicians from all around the world have been using the site to upload their music whether it be simple audio tracks, lyric videos or music videos. Successful artists can gain millions or even billions of views on their music videos which generates a huge amount of popularity and profit for the artist/record label. For example: Beyonce, Paramore, Psy and 

Michael Jackson.

 In some cases, artists careers can be formed on the site which can lead to become huge successes purely because they gained large amounts of views which lead to them being recognised by record labels. Perhaps the most known example of this is Justin Bieber. 

Advantages/Disadvantages

There are many obvious advantages to uploading content as an artist/producer or prosumer such as:

1. The site allows you to distribute your product to a possibly huge audience easily. 
2. There is a possibility you can generate a large amount of money/profit from putting your product on the site through advertisements and revenue.
3. By opening up yourself to a larger audience it can lead to more opportunities, for example in recent times the integration between YouTube and the television industry. 

However there are also some disadvantages to distributing your product on this site: 

1. There are increased chances of cyber bullying, specifically on the internet a popular form of this is known as "trolling" 
2. Accessing the target audience may appear very difficult 
3. The extreme competition between other creators can become intense at reaching the target audience