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David Bruce interviewed a few musicians, Nahre Sol also recorded several in-
terviews (e.g. with Andrew Huang, Tanya Gabrielian, and Barbara Berg), and
Inside the Score features an interview with a video game music composer. Nah-
re Sol and Adam Neely talk about music software and equipment, and Rick
Beato offers numerous tips in the field of music production, such as recording
guitar and drums, mixing vocals, and using compression. There are also music
reviews on almost all channels (e.g. a review of the video game soundtrack Zel
da: Breath of the Wild made by Nahre Sol), as well as tips for studying and pra-
cticing effectively, creating working habits, staying motivated and developing a
musical career. Creators also publish reaction videos, i.e. video responses to the
content made by other YouTubers (e.g. David Bruce Composer: ‘The Unbea-
rable Irrelevance of Contemporary Music - a response to Samuel Andreyev’).
Regarding educational videos, YouTube creators problematize the topics
in an interesting way, combining academic and less formal teaching strategies.
Explanation of music phenomena is both theoretical and practical, providing
examples from different style periods and/or music genres, which leads to the
conclusion that the creators prefer using synchronic over the diachronic (histo-
rical) approach while teaching. Talking about a certain topic, the creators usu-
ally refer to the literature that covers the topic, i.e. the literature they used spe- Nikolina Matoš, Srđan Stanojević ◆ The educational potential of YouTube channels for teaching and learning music
cifically for the video (Table 5).
Users’ engagement and their comments on YouTube videos demonstrate
the importance and the truthfulness of information given by creators, but we
can also find some reaction/response videos in which other creators express di-
sagreement in relation to a certain topic. Critically approaching the channels’
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content, we noted that creators, while making some of the videos, aim at ga-
ining popularity and getting as many views as possible. That kind of approa-
ch is visible to viewers through ‘clickbait’ titles and attractive thumbnails. Sin-
ce YouTube brings money to the creators, this approach is understandable to a
certain extent. However, these videos are only a smaller part of each channel’s
content, and creators generally upload high quality material.
In general, educational videos can be divided into the following catego-
ries: (1) metre and rhythm, (2) tonal structure, (3) musical form, (4) musicolo-
gical content, (5) music composition and creation, (6) music performance, (7)
development of music skills and abilities, and (8) reflections on music and mu-
sic education. Within the metre and rhythm category, creators explain the con-
cepts of simple and complex metres, rhythmic patterns, and pattern combina-
tions. Some of them analysed the rhythm of a certain artist or a composition
alone: for example, on David Bruce’s channel there is a video called ‘Classi-
cal composer analyses Kendrick Lamar’, where Bruce talks about the rhythm
in Lamar’s song ‘Alright’. In the category of tonal structure, creators often
4 Reaction videos to Adam Neely’s content: ‘Is Cb the Same Note As B? (A Response To
Adam Neely)’ (channel: 12tone); ‘Adam Neely is Wrong About…… A LOT’ (channel: NA-
ETE).
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