Archive / Volume 9, Issue 4, October 2019

“What’s So Awesome with YouTube”: Learning Music with Social Media Celebrities

Vittorio Marone 1 * , Ruben C. Rodriguez 1 *

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Abstract

The widespread popularity of video-centered social media like YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion is fostering new ways of teaching and learning music online. These media allow producers of educational content to reach, interact with, and respond to a global audience of interested viewers. Through a multimodal analysis approach, this study examined guitar-related lessons, tutorials, and reviews created and shared by artists and enthusiasts who reached a “celebrity” status on YouTube. Findings show that these teachers-celebrities construct their online presence and communicate with their audience through authenticity, approachability, and humor, in short-format and high-quality videos. The seamless integration of instructional content, branding, and references to the authors’ personal lives and worldviews generates a unique teaching and learning environment that challenges traditional understandings of music education.

Keywords

YouTube social media informal music learning self-directed music learning video tutorials guitar learning

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This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Article Type: Research Article

https://doi.org/10.29333/ojcmt/5955

Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, Volume 9, Issue 4, Article No: e201928

Published Online: 11 Oct 2019

Article Views: 375

Article Downloads: 117

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