Yes, Lady Gaga and Eminem are performing and yes, One Direction and Justin Bieber are award nominees. Like in any awards show, mainstream tastes dominate. But the way the YouTube Music Awards calculate mainstream opinion is important. In this online awards show, nominations and votes are calculated from engagement across YouTube, Facebook, Google+ and Yahoo platforms. The YouTube Music Awards reflects a new, more interactive media landscape and proves interactive and inclusive online presences are valuable. Artists–mainstream or not–should take note of how this awards ceremony officially recognizes social media’s role in artist-to-audience relationships.The ‘Video of the Year’ and ‘Artist of the Year’ nominations don’t pack any surprising punches. Contenders such as Katy Perry, Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber are as Top-40-friendly as any MTV Video Music Award nominee, but were selected for the YTMAs based on pageviews, shares, likes and comments. It makes sense that these three artists are also among the most-followed celebrities on Twitter. Booking the right radio stations, television broadcasts and concert venues once propelled artists to fame. Now, social media is an unquestionably important part of that equation.
The more selective ‘Innovation of the Year’ nomination criteria also reflects the new media landscape. An “international panel of musicians, YouTubers and creative luminaries” made nominations, but the list was finalized based on which innovative videos had the most views, likes, shares and comments. Nominations in this category include Anamanaguchi, “Endless Fantasy”; Atoms For Peace, “Ingenue”; Bat For Lashes, “Lilies”; DeStorm, “See Me Standing”; and Toro Y Moi, “Say That”. The demand for not just innovation, but also recognition from online audiences presents an important “If a tree falls in the woods..” question for digital-era artists. Creating great work is not enough. That work must elicit reactions on the YouTube platform and social media.
And even then, tallying views and shares doesn’t account for just how active some fans are in the new economy of entertainment. The ‘Response of the Year’ and ‘YouTube Phenomenon’ awards acknowledge how many videos fans create themselves. The ‘Response of the Year’ award goes to the best fan remix, parody or response video and nominees include Boyce Avenue (feat. Fifth Harmony) “Mirrors”; Jayesslee, “Gangnam Style”; Lindsey Stirling and Pentatonix, “Radioactive”; ThePianoGuys, “Titanium/Pavane”; and Walk Off the Earth (feat. KRNFX), “I Knew You Were Trouble”. The ‘YouTube Phenomenon’ award goes to ‘trends the world could not escape from’. Nominees are based on the phenomena that generated the most fan videos and include Diamonds, Gangnam Style, Harlem Shake, I Knew You Were Trouble and Thrift Shop. Doling out awards for creative and/or voluminous responses to music videos signals a more active viewing experience and suggests artists should be prepared to activate fans’ own creative responses to their work.
Reggie Watts Explains Social Voting In 'How to Cast Your Vote for the YTMAs'
Social media stats informed nominations and social media shares will determine the winners. As Reggie Watts explains in How to Cast Your Votes for the YTMAs, fans vote by searching ‘YTMA’ on YouTube and sharing their favorite nominees’ playlists on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter. On November 3rd, millions will watch the awards show live on YouTube, commenting on, livetweeting and liking the videos they see. Compared to the MTV Video Music Awards, which gives awards based on professional selections and audience voting, or the People’s Choice Awards, which recorded popular opinion through Gallup polls until 2005 and didn’t even look at viewing behavior statistics until 2010, the YouTube Music Awards brings a much-needed social media reality check to awards shows. Though nominations this year might not reflect YouTube’s full artistic bandwidth, the social media nomination and selection process is a telling snapshot of digital entertainment.
The Youtube Music Awards: Why Artists Should Care
The men's hockey team returned to the ice this past week, hoping to ignore last year's 2-14-2 conference record. Despite improving in all facets of the game and boasting a much deeper lineup, Tufts dropped its first two contests of the year to Wesleyan and Trinity, once again putting the team in an uphill battle in the NESCAC.
Still, the Jumbos are optimistic that its 2013-14 season will be different than the previous one. Tufts lost its team leader in points from the 2012-13 season, Dylan Plimmer (LA '13), but the Jumbos returned all but three players and maintained the backbone of a team that struggled late in games. Co-captains senior Cody Armstrong and junior Blake Edwards step in as the team's leaders, and if the preseason was any indication, they have taken aim at some fundamental problems.
Most of the change this preseason has been a culture change on top of the hard work," sophomore forward James Randaccio said. "We built in some new preseason and summer workouts and revamped our preseason workouts to make sure everything was up to gear this year."
At the forward position, the Jumbos are deep, mixing in freshmen with a solid core of veterans. Freshmen Matt Pugh and Conal Lynch play center for the first and second lines, respectively, a move that coach Brian Murphy hopes will spark some goal-scoring opportunities for a team that finished seventh in the NESCAC in scoring offense last year. Pugh is joined by sophomore Stewart Bell and junior Andrew White, the team's second and fourth top scorers from last year's campaign, respectively, while Lynch is surrounded by a pair of veterans in junior Tyler Voigt and senior Kyle Gallegos.
Through the first two games, however, the third line has been the strongest unit. Sophomores Luke Griffin and Keith Campbell have quickly developed chemistry with junior George Pantazopoulos, who is the team's leading goal-scorer after netting a goal in each of the first two games.
The fourth line has also proven to be a perfect grind-it-out unit that combines hard-nosed play with a cohesive offensive approach. Randaccio and senior forward Tim Mitropoulous complement each other in size and style, while a rotating duo of freshmen Mike Leary and Patrick Lackey, two physical young forwards, will take turns on the wing.
"We have three great forward lines and a fourth line that really shows our depth," senior defenseman Brandon Fruchter said of his teammates. "That is what makes us a really strong team this year."
Fruchter is one of the Jumbos' six defensemen who are looking to turn around last year's unit, which allowed the most goals in the NESCAC. He is paired with sophomore Aidan Hartigan, and together they are perhaps the two most traditional defensemen on the team.
The duo of junior Shawn Power and freshman Sean Kavanagh, two of the team's biggest skaters, gives the team much-needed size and physicality. The most impressive defensive pairing so far, however, has been junior Blake Edwards and sophomore Brian Ouellette, who have shown the chemistry and puck-handling prowess to be two of the best offensive defensemen in the NESCAC.
While all six defensemen are as skilled as their counterparts throughout the conference, the success of the defense will depend on more than just individual players.
"Our top six has done really well in practice," Randaccio said. "We have the tools
