Curious Thoughts | Ep. 01 | Are musical covers on YouTube (India) becoming monotonous?

DISCLAIMER: This post is not a rant. It is more of those curious thoughts that make you ponder for a while and then in no time you end up with more questions than answers. I appreciate all the effort and hard work YouTube artists put into their content and thoroughly enjoy their knowledge and talent in music. Keep up the GOOD work!

I am constantly in search of new and fresh musical content on YouTube. During my search I've come across really talented artists, some of which I've got a chance to talk to and you can check out those conversations with Lisa Mishra on Live Covers, Siddharth Slathia on Indian Classical Music Tutorials, Saurabh Shetye on Acoustic Loop Covers and Tushar Lall on Indo-Western Fusion. Over a period of time I realized that most of the videos by musical artists on YouTube (India) are covers of soft Bollywood numbers. Anything other than melody songs are a rare commodity to find on YouTube nowadays. This made me wonder - what could be the reason for such a trend?

What are soft numbers of melody songs?
They are the kind of songs you like to listen when you are with your girlfriend. The reason I say just girlfriend is because most of these Bollywood songs are sung by male singers. They are the kind of songs you like to listen to in your comfort zone. They are the songs you can hum to. They are basically convenient songs with slow beats and hypothetical lyrics.

Now let's get into why YouTube artists are creating such covers more. Let us make a list for the ease of understanding.
  • Creating a YouTube cover for a melody song requires minimal instruments. A simple guitar or a piano or even a karaoke track would do the job.
  • The tempo for these songs is slow which makes it easier for artists to get the notes correctly and also catch up on their breath.
  • The singing scale of these songs suites both, male and female singers. For example, check out these two covers for the same song - Bol Do Na Zara (Unplugged) by Siddharth Slathia and Bol Do Na Zara by Lisa Mishra. While Siddharth has used piano for his cover, Lisa has used guitar. The original song is sung by Armaan Malik. These covers have been used as reference only because I've previously taken permission from these artists to write about their channel on this blog.
  • Like mentioned before, melody songs have slow pace and hence while recording the video, minimal body movements are sufficient to complement the song. Artists either play a instruments in their room, lip sync to their song on photogenic locations or create a story around it and play it in the background (very rare to see this type) in their videos. Dancing or too many gestures are not required.
  • Melody songs are instant hits (thanks to Arijit Singh and Armaan Malik) so it is easy to ride on their popularity. Tum Hi Ho (Aashiqui 2) is the most popular melody number of all-time with over 108M views till date. These are some top covers of this song Tum Hi Ho (Acoustic Cover) - 17M views, Tum Hi Ho (You Got It Bad Remix) - 9M views, Tum Hi Ho (Instrumental) - 7M views, Tum Hi Ho (Canadian Groom sings to Indian Bride) - 5.8M views and Tum Hi Ho (Studio Cover) - 2.8M views. These are just most viewed ones and they account for almost 45M views. There might be hundreds of other covers. See what I am trying to say?
Now let us get into why YouTube artists are not exploring other genre of songs. First and foremost, artists are getting into different genre and moods of music, be it Sufi, ghazal, sad songs, old songs or even regional songs. What I would love to see them explore are songs with a higher tempo (fast paced songs). A better question to answer here would why is it difficult to create a cover of a party song, dance number or an item number. Let's make a list again.
  • There is a perfect reason why they are called dance numbers - so that people can dance, and not sing. 
  • These songs require a lot of musical arrangements and hence the easiest way to make a cover for these songs is either using karaoke track or a professional MIDI player.
  • These songs usually have multiple singers (male and female) which makes it difficult to create covers by solo artists.
  • Use of auto tune. Most of these songs are beat-focused rather than singer-focused and hence even an average singer can deliver a hit song with the help of auto tune. The biggest asset of a YouTube artist is this their singing capability.
  • One of the most popular song of this type is Subha Hone Na De (Desi Boyz) with over 85M views on YouTube till date. The combined views of all the covers I could find on YouTube is not even 1 million. See what I am trying to say?
After giving out pros and cons of both side I can be diplomatic and leave it out on you guys to figure out the answer. But no, I have my opinion. Yes, of late the musical covers are getting monotonous. Every YouTuber is making covers of latest and the most popular melody songs. Rather than showing their creative side, it has now become a race to upload their cover fastest. There are two reasons to this - first, YouTube's revenue system (I will not get into this topic, Google it for more information) and second, being popular YouTube artist is providing them with opportunities to perform in front of live audience and hence, uploading such covers just ensures that their channels are maintained with increasing subscribers and views. 

Maybe there is a lot more to write on this subject or maybe I just had additional thoughts writing this post. Either ways, this is enough food for thought for my first curious thought on music. I hope you liked it. If you did then feel free to share it. Let me know thoughts in the comments below. Until then, Ciao...!

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