tankt

Google paid $1,650,000,000.00 for YouTube today. For their investors, that’s a 41x return in less than two years. For the founders, well, damn. Word is they each pocketed between $100,000,000 and $200,000,000. Yes, each. In less than two years.

YouTube is truly brilliant. It, or some variation on its trailblazing theme, will be the way we experience media in the years to come. The interface itself, where the entire video is a play button, puts even Apple to shame in simplicity (and while I’m thinking of Apple, do I really have to use iTunes for everything?). Perhaps more important is the power of immediacy.

Think about what you have to do to watch a dvd: find it (assuming the disc still lives in its original case), power on the dvd player, sit through a ridiculously long and unskippable warning message, plus the studio intro, only to come to an unusable interface (where’s the damn remote?!!).

YouTube is instantaneous. All you do is press play. While searching on the site itself is somewhat painful, I expect (hope) Google will solve that riddle in short order. What ‘Tooble’ then becomes is a jukebox of our collective memory. What was once forgotten is now only a click away…

Think about how many things you want to watch but don’t own. Or can’t own. Stuff no one owns, but we all own in our hearts and minds.

In many ways, YouTube is the new MTV. Or maybe I am, on a much more intimate (and immediate) scale, because of it. So where to begin?

The Unicorns in 2004:

versus The Dead Milkmen in 1993:

If I wasn’t so tired, I would tell you any number of detailed stories attached to these songs (such as, hearing the Unicorns for the first time at American Apparel on Haight Street, asking the heavily sedated / ridiculously stoned staff ‘who sings this song?’ to which they reply in unison ‘the Unicorns’ to which I reply ‘oh, obviously’; staying late after work to send AIMs about unicorns from Sterling’s computer: ‘I love unicorns and rainbows’; seeing the Dead Milkmen perform live, not once but twice, with Mojo Nixon as the opener for the second show; and on and on). Or maybe I could tie this post together with a word about being young, precocious, and not at all afraid to run with it, much like subjects of this post: the Unicorns, the Dead Milkmen, and YouTube.

Related posts

• I work 9-5 but I want to get out I found this song on bleep the other day, not yet released (damn! well, I suppose I can wait),...
• Radiohead covered The Smiths and I just found out about it yesterday?!!From here on out, if and when something so momentous comes to pass and I haven't mentioned it on this...
• A penguin and carnation, a lemon and dalmatian, though I look for inspiration, still my favourite combination…...is Candylion. I love this song. So much that I had to download it illegally, just so I could take...
• Or, just go to the home page.