At first, the channel grew slowly. Then, in the spring of 2016, Mr. Pritchard discovered 24/7 live-streaming, a feature that allows YouTube’s users to broadcast a single video continuously.
College Music had 794 subscribers in April 2015, a year before Mr. Pritchard and Mr. Laxton started streaming. A month after they began, they had more than 18,440. In April 2016, they had 98,110 subscribers and as of last month, with three active live streams, they have more than triple that amount, with 334,000. They make about $5,000 a month from the streams.
The boys stumbled upon a new strategy, one that, in the past two years, has helped a certain kind of YouTube channel achieve widespread popularity. Hundreds of independently run channels have begun to stream music nonstop, with videos that combine playlists with hundreds of songs and short, looped animations, often taken from anime films without copyright permission.
Live streams come in many different genres. Two of College Music’s streams are part of a family of channels that broadcast what the broadcasters call lofi (low-fidelity) hip-hop, mellow music that would sound familiar to fans of J. Dilla and Nujabes.
Such videos, with subscriber counts in the hundreds of thousands, are some of most popular continuously streaming music stations on the site. Many are run by young Europeans, who may have only a passing familiarity with the history of the music they are spreading.
And they don’t know why, but their users really do insist on the anime images.
The channels occupy a precarious space between YouTube’s algorithm and its copyright policing, drawing comparisons to the unlicensed pirate radio stations of the 20th century, recreated in the digital sphere. Many of the channels blink in and out of existence within a week, but their presence has become a compelling part of the site’s musical ecosystem. And while competitors like Spotify are gaining, YouTube still dominates the streaming world, according to the latest Music Consumer Insight Reportfrom the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.
When Mr. Pritchard and Mr. Laxton started streaming, they ran the channel from Mr. Pritchard’s dorm, which was right above the housemaster’s room.
Live streams like theirs succeed in part by exploiting user behavior. According to channel operators, YouTube users often click off a video after several minutes, before the clip has concluded. But users who listen to live streams tend to play them for a half-hour or more, often as background music. That boosts the videos’ retention rates, which compels YouTube to promote them more widely.
by Jonah Engel Bromwich, NY Times | Read more:
Video: YouTube
