Music, Youtube, and Academic Libraries

The current environment of video sharing sites like YouTube, and direct-to-consumer digital music distribution models, presents challenges to academic music libraries’ primary mission of building collections of materials to support research and create a record of scholarly and artistic output. The rise in the use of smart mobile devices that allow individuals to store large quantities of music and use sites like YouTube has created an expectation that finding and accessing music should be convenient and easy. This article examines the ways in which university music faculty members in the United States consider YouTube use in their teaching and research. It finds that there are differences in how faculty in different music subdisciplines view and use YouTube, and that there is a dichotomy in how faculty as a whole value YouTube for teaching compared with their own work. Faculty understanding of YouTube’s content, legality, and applications for teaching and research varies widely. Finally, this article illuminates how faculty view their institutional libraries in comparison to sites like YouTube, and explores the implications all of this might have for the future of library collections.