Issue #010 — The Music Issue
Music came before agriculture. Before cities. Before writing. Before almost everything we call civilisation, there was someone sitting in the dark, hitting something rhythmically, listening to the sound bounce off a cave wall and thinking: yes, more of that. This fact is not irrelevant to a YouTube review magazine. It is, in fact, the entire point.
We have spent nine issues examining what YouTube does to knowledge, to craft, to the underground, to longevity, to voice, to nostalgia, to the specific and the niche. In all that time, we have circled the question of music YouTube the way you circle a drain — aware of where it's going, reluctant to look directly at it. Not because the subject is uninteresting. Because it is overwhelming. Music YouTube is not a genre. It is a civilisation. It has its own nations, its own wars, its own economies, its own religions. The music theory renaissance alone has changed how a generation understands sound. The bedroom producer pipeline has democratised creation in ways that would have seemed impossible twenty years ago. And yet the platform's relationship with music is also one of the strangest, most legally tortured, most culturally complex stories in the history of recorded art.
So. Here we are. Issue ten. The Music Issue.
A few debts to pay before we begin. Adam Neely has been sitting at #38 in the Top 50 since Issue #007, a number so obviously wrong that three separate readers wrote in to say so, and Yob told all three of them they were correct, which is essentially unprecedented in the history of this magazine. We said we'd fix it. We've fixed it. The re-evaluation is in the Player Profiles section. I will say no more except that the movement indicator next to his name in the High Scores table is — and I do not use this word lightly — a record.
We also owe Roland Barthes an interview. He was flagged in Issue #008 and flagged again in Issue #009. Yob mentioned him in the letters page both times with the kind of enthusiasm he usually reserves for slagging off channels he actually likes. The interview is here. It is, appropriately, primarily about what listeners do to music rather than what musicians do to listeners. Barthes would have had a lot to say about the comment section beneath a Rick Beato video. He says it.
The special feature this issue is called The Last Radio Station, and it is about what YouTube has actually replaced, and what we didn't know we were losing when radio died, and what we didn't know we were gaining when a bassoon-playing teenager in Osaka got three million subscribers posting weekly. I think it is the best special feature we have published. The editorial team disagrees with me about that. The editorial team is wrong.
Also in this issue: Davie504 gets the review he has both earned and deserved for approximately five years. We are not cruel about it. We are merely honest. There is a difference. The score speaks for itself.
Nine issues in, a note on what we're doing here. Every issue, we receive letters asking if the magazine is serious, or satirical, or a project, or a game. The answer is: it is a magazine that takes YouTube seriously because YouTube deserves to be taken seriously — not despite being a free platform full of amateur creators making videos in their kitchens, but precisely because of it. The best thing happening in music education right now is on YouTube. The most interesting music theory debate of the last decade happened in a comment section under an Adam Neely video. The musicians who would have been lost to history — the regional, the niche, the genre-defying — are findable now in ways they never were before.
That is worth a magazine. Ten issues in, we believe this more, not less.
Press Start.
— The Editor, March 2026
Seven items. One of them is satirical. Good luck working out which.
Music educator and YouTube veteran Rick Beato, who has spent years battling automated copyright claims from major labels on his own original analytical content, reports that his most recent video — a breakdown of harmonic theory using a passage he composed himself — was claimed within 47 minutes of upload by a rights management firm citing "melodic similarity" to a song released in 1994. The claim has since been disputed. "At this point," Beato told his community, "I feel like I'm being trolled by the concept of intellectual property." The label has not responded. The video remains monetised in their favour.
YouTube Music has announced it has passed one hundred million subscribers globally, becoming one of the largest music streaming platforms on the planet. This milestone has been met with widespread confusion, as surveys indicate that approximately 73% of YouTube Music subscribers discovered they were subscribed through a YouTube Premium bundle they signed up for to remove ads from a Mark Rober video in 2019. The remaining 27% who use it deliberately report that the interface "still feels like someone described Spotify to a developer who had never seen music." Spotify remains unconcerned. Apple Music remains Apple Music.
A study tracking YouTube viewership categories from 2019 to 2025 has found that music theory content — broadly defined as channels explaining how music actually works — has seen the steepest sustained growth of any educational category on the platform. Channels like Adam Neely, 12tone, and Tantacrul have collectively accumulated hundreds of millions of views on content that traditional music institutions would have charged thousands of pounds to deliver. Music academics are divided: some see this as democratisation; others are writing increasingly long posts on their university intranets about it. The students are watching YouTube regardless.
ChilledCow, now rebranded as Lofi Girl, updated their iconic "study girl" animated thumbnail — the most-watched live stream in YouTube history by some metrics — prompting a reaction from the internet that was disproportionate only until you realised the original image had been a constant companion for millions of people through exams, grief, late-night work sessions, and global lockdowns. The new design was well-received within 72 hours. Seventeen people still prefer the old one and maintain a dedicated subreddit about this. Yob supports them unconditionally.
A composer and YouTuber who posts original ambient pieces found their entire back catalogue subject to automated claims from a major rights management firm, citing "harmonic similarity" to tracks in a library the firm represents. The composer notes that the claimed tracks are all in the key of C major. So, by some estimates, is approximately forty percent of all Western music ever recorded. The case highlights the accelerating use of AI-powered rights detection tools across the platform, tools that cannot distinguish between a structural similarity and a genuine breach, but that monetise both equally well. YouTube's dispute process remains as Kafkaesque as ever.
Data from Bandcamp's 2025 annual report shows that artists who built their initial audience entirely through YouTube — tutorial channels, performance videos, genre explainers — now account for the majority of independent album sales on the platform. The pipeline from "guy explains music production in his bedroom" to "actually has an audience willing to pay for music" is now well-established and well-documented. This is creating a generation of musicians who have never signed to a label and have no particular desire to. The labels are aware of this. Their response has been to focus on the harmonic similarity lawsuit described above.
In a move analysts are calling "inevitable," YouTube has announced a new monetisation tier exclusively for reaction content, in which creators watch music videos and make facial expressions at them for between eight and twenty-two minutes. The tier, called YouTube React+, will feature a proprietary "Authentic Response Meter" that measures viewer engagement by tracking how long a creator maintains an expression of surprise at a guitar solo they have already watched nineteen times for previous videos. Creators can unlock the "Genuine Emotion" badge after six hundred hours of surprised faces. The first application was approved within minutes. It was from Davie504. (CTRL+WATCH acknowledges this item is satirical.)
Six voices from history encounter music YouTube. They have thoughts.
Four reviews. One re-evaluation nine issues in the making. One verdict that had to happen eventually.
Adam Neely was first scored at 84 in Issue #007. We said the score was provisional. We said he'd be revisited. We lied by saying it would be soon. It wasn't soon. It is now. Here is the review he should have had from the beginning.
~1.9M subscribers // Uploads: irregular but substantial // Est. 2010 // Brooklyn, NY
Let us start with an act of contrition. When CTRL+WATCH placed Adam Neely at 84 in Issue #007 — in a review that was, frankly, adequate but not equal to the subject — a reader wrote in to say we had got it wrong. Yob agreed. We noted that a re-evaluation was coming. It has taken three issues to arrive. This is embarrassing. The score of 91, however, is not a consolation prize. It is the number this channel has earned, and the arithmetic of why that is true occupies the next thousand words.
Adam Neely does something rare enough on YouTube that it deserves its own category: he makes music theory feel like the most urgent conversation happening anywhere. His videos are not explainers. They are not tutorials. They are, in the most precise sense, essays — complete arguments with theses, evidence, counterarguments, and conclusions that change how you hear music afterward. The video "Music Theory and White Supremacy," to take one non-musical example, is the best piece of critical writing about the politics of cultural canon that this magazine has encountered in any medium in the last five years, including print. The fact that it has bass guitar in it should not diminish that claim.
What Neely does technically — and the technical level here is genuinely exceptional, conservatory-trained while never being conservatory-constrained — is less interesting than what he does structurally. He builds arguments. Each video has a problem at its centre — why does this chord progression feel unresolved? what does it mean for a song to be "in a key"? why did everyone try to ban the tritone? — and the answer it arrives at is never the answer you expected going in. He sets up your wrong assumption, lets you sit with it, and then disassembles it so methodically that you feel grateful for having been disassembled.
The bass playing is, separately, excellent. But Neely wears his technical skill lightly, using it as evidence rather than spectacle. When he plays a passage to demonstrate a point, he plays it in the service of the argument. It does not become a performance unless the argument requires a performance. This is an editorial discipline so rare in music YouTube that it's worth naming explicitly.
The X-Factor here — and this is where 84 became obviously insufficient — is that Neely's channel generates genuine intellectual community. The comments are full of actual music theorists, actual jazz musicians, actual audio engineers, all arguing constructively because the video gave them something worth arguing about. This is vanishingly rare. Most channels have a comment section. Neely's channel has a seminar.
Consistency has always been the one shadow on this channel — uploads are irregular, periods of silence stretch for months — but this has been weighted appropriately. A channel that publishes twelve adequate videos per year is not preferable to one that publishes four extraordinary ones. We have occasionally needed to remind ourselves of this principle. The Adam Neely re-evaluation is a useful reminder.
There is one more thing to say, and it relates to the note in our Issue #009 tracker where Yob announced in the letters page that the Music Issue would bring a definitive verdict. That note read: "Yob has been sitting on this for six months and the number is going up." Yob was right. The number has gone up. From #38, with a score of 84, Adam Neely now sits in the top five of the CTRL+WATCH Top 50. The movement indicator in the High Scores table is the largest upward jump in the magazine's ten-issue history. It surpasses the JCS re-evaluation from Issue #007, which was itself described as unprecedented. It is, frankly, a correction that should have been made sooner. We are correcting it now.
PREVIOUS SCORE (Issue #007): 84 / EXCELLENT | NEW SCORE: 91 / ESSENTIAL | TOP 50 MOVEMENT: ↑33 (NEW MAGAZINE RECORD)
~750K subscribers // Uploads: very irregular, no apologies // Est. 2015 // Dublin, Ireland
Martin Keary — Tantacrul — has produced the most purely funny video essays on YouTube about a subject that has no right to be funny. Music software design should not be entertaining. It should be the thing you endure before making the music. Instead, Keary has made the design of music software into a vehicle for comedy writing of a very specific and high quality: the comedy of righteous exasperation, of someone who understands a system deeply enough to see exactly why it is terrible, and is furious about it in the most articulate possible way.
His video on Sibelius — the notation software — is a document about how legacy software accumulates design decisions the way a Victorian house accumulates insulation, each layer made by people who could not see the full structure and could not afford to tear it down. This is, technically, a video about a music notation program. It is also, in practice, a philosophical essay about institutional inertia, about sunk cost, about how the people closest to a system develop a learned blindness to its absurdities. The music angle is almost incidental. The comedy is not incidental at all.
His video "Music Theory and White Supremacy" — a genuinely confrontational title, deployed with full awareness of what it would generate in terms of defensive reactions — argues that much of what music conservatories teach as universal theory is not universal but culturally specific, and that the specificity has been obscured to serve a particular tradition at the expense of others. This is the same argument Nina Simone makes in this very issue's Time Capsule. That a video essay by an Irish software designer arrives at the same conclusion as one of the great African American musicians of the twentieth century is either evidence that the argument is correct, or evidence that they've both read the same source material. Either way, the argument is worth engaging with, and Tantacrul makes you engage with it by being funny about it first.
Consistency is the one category that demands a reckoning. Tantacrul uploads infrequently. Not rarely-but-prolifically the way Clickspring does, where each video is a complete masterwork that justifies a three-month wait. More in the manner of someone who has a full creative process and a low tolerance for rushing it. This is respectable and also means that subscribers spend long periods staring at a channel page that hasn't changed. The algorithm punishes this. The audience forgives it. The magazine takes it into account.
The X-Factor score here is the important one. Tantacrul has a genuinely distinctive comic sensibility — dry, patient, escalating from reasonable premise to absurd conclusion via completely logical steps — that has no equivalent elsewhere on the platform. The closest comparison is Vsauce in terms of tone, but where Vsauce deploys wonder as its primary affect, Tantacrul deploys contempt. Well-researched, affectionate contempt, the contempt of someone who has used Sibelius for twenty years and knows exactly which menu you shouldn't have to navigate to find a basic function. This is a specific niche. It is a brilliant one.
VERDICT: 85 / EXCELLENT | TOP 50: New entry at #30
~1.1M subscribers // Uploads: monthly-ish // Est. 2016 // Thoughtful Undisclosed Location
Sideways occupies a specific and underserved position in music YouTube: the analysis of how music functions within other media. Not music in isolation. Music as it exists in films, in games, in advertising, in the emotional architecture of stories we're already invested in. This is a different discipline from theory or performance criticism, and it is one that requires a very particular kind of attention — the ability to hear what the music is doing while also watching what everything else is doing, and to identify the moment where they diverge, align, or work against each other.
The channel's videos on film scores — how composers establish thematic material, develop it, and deploy it at critical narrative moments — are models of the genre. Clear, accessible to non-musicians, rigorous enough to satisfy those with formal training, and built around genuine enthusiasms. The video on the music of Mad Max: Fury Road is a good entry point: it makes an argument about how Junkie XL's industrial score is structurally making the same argument as the film's visual language, the two working in parallel rather than support. This is the kind of observation that seems obvious once stated and invisible before. Good criticism always works this way.
The weak point, such as it is, is a certain variability in depth. Some videos arrive at their conclusions very directly, without the detours that make the journey interesting. The best essays — the ones that have stayed watchable on rewatch — are the ones that take unexpected routes. The more efficient ones feel, occasionally, like they're explaining rather than discovering. This is a minor complaint about a channel that consistently produces substantive content, but it is the gap between 84 and the upper tier where Adam Neely lives.
Community score is slightly suppressed because the comment sections, while positive, tend toward affirmation rather than engagement — lots of "I never noticed this before!" rather than "Actually, I'd argue the score is doing something different in this scene." This is not a criticism of the audience. It reflects a channel that is teaching rather than debating, and teaching very well. The debate would make it better. The teaching is already good.
VERDICT: 84 / EXCELLENT | TOP 50: New entry at #35
~13M subscribers // Uploads: 2-3 per week, reliably // Est. 2012 // Turin, Italy
Let us be fair to what Davie504 was, before we discuss what it is. The early channel — the pre-algorithm-optimised Davie504 of 2015-2018 — is actually worth watching. There is a video of a young Italian bassist playing a cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on bass alone that is genuinely impressive, affectionate, and creative. There are early comedy sketches about the social dynamics of being a bassist — the eternal "bass player arrives with a sofa" gag, done with real comedic timing — that have an authentic energy. There was, for a moment, something here that combined genuine musical skill with genuine comic sensibility. That moment has passed.
What replaced it is one of the clearest examples of algorithmic calcification we have documented in this magazine's history — a process by which a creator identifies a format that performs well, reduces that format to its repeatable core, and produces it on a schedule that prioritises volume over development. The format, in Davie504's case: establish a premise ("Can [non-musician/non-instrument/non-human entity] play bass?"), deliver variations on the premise for eight to twelve minutes, include multiple moments where Davie says "NO" in large text. Repeat. Twice a week. For five years.
Thirteen million subscribers is not nothing, and we acknowledge the skill involved in building and retaining an audience of that size. The comedy is functional — the timing is still there, the persona is consistent, the production is clean. But skill deployed in service of a fully calcified format is not the same as creative output. At this point, watching a new Davie504 video is the experience of watching someone who learned to be funny demonstrate that they still know how. It is competence without discovery.
The music is the deepest casualty. Davie504 is — genuinely, technically — an accomplished bass player. This has become almost invisible in the current output. The bass appears as a prop in comedy skits rather than as the subject of musical exploration. The early videos where technique was the point — where a difficult passage was performed because it was interesting to perform — have been replaced by videos where the bass is present because the channel is "about bass," in the way a channel about bass should have a bass in it somewhere.
A score of 55 is not cruelty. It is an acknowledgment that a channel can have thirteen million subscribers and be creatively moribund simultaneously, that growth metrics and artistic merit have never been the same number, and that the magazine serves its readers best by saying clearly: this is not what music YouTube can be at its best. This is what music YouTube looks like when a creator has been optimised past the point of making things worth making. The score reflects the channel as it is now, not the channel it was. The channel it was would have scored higher. That channel is no longer being made.
VERDICT: 55 / MEDIOCRE | TOP 50: Does NOT enter
CATEGORY: MUSIC ANALYSIS // DIVISION: EDUCATION & THEORY
Two channels. Same territory. Radically different philosophies. Rick Beato built an audience of four million on the foundation of professional credibility, emotional directness, and a dad-who-actually-knows-what-he's-talking-about energy that cuts through academic distance. 12tone built an audience in the hundreds of thousands on a system of visual notation, colour-coded diagrams, and analytical rigour that prioritises methodology over accessibility. Both channels are asking the same question — why does this music work? — and arriving at answers that look almost nothing alike. The magazine has been circling this matchup since Issue #007. We are done circling.
~4.2M subscribers. Music producer, guitarist, educator. "What Makes This Song Great?" — over 200 episodes. Battles with copyright have become their own narrative arc. Former major label A&R. Gives the impression of someone who cannot stop caring about music and cannot stop being frustrated about the industry simultaneously.
~680K subscribers. Music theorist. The diagrams. Always the diagrams. Every analysis becomes a colour-coded visual system. Less accessible on first encounter, more rewarding on subsequent ones. The channel that makes you feel like you're learning something structurally new, not just being told something interesting.
RICK BEATO
Subscribers: ~4.2M
Output: ~3-4 videos/week
Format: Talking head + instrument demos
Target: General music lovers
Signature: Ear training, song analysis
Weakness: Copyright limitations, occasional repetition
Strength: Emotional accessibility, range of genres covered
12TONE
Subscribers: ~680K
Output: ~2 videos/month
Format: Diagrammatic analysis, narrated
Target: Engaged theory students
Signature: The colour-coded notation system
Weakness: Steep initial learning curve
Strength: Methodological consistency, intellectual rigour
ROUND 1 — CONTENT QUALITY
Rick Beato's content quality is excellent in aggregate and occasionally transcendent. The best "What Makes This Song Great" episodes — particularly the more personal ones, where his evident emotional investment in the material breaks through the analytical scaffolding — are some of the most accessible music education on the platform. He communicates why he finds something extraordinary, and that transmission of feeling is a form of teaching that purely technical analysis cannot replicate.
12tone's content quality is, within its narrower bandwidth, higher. The diagrammatic system — whatever you think of its aesthetics — is genuinely revealing. It shows you the structure of a piece in a way that standard notation does not, making relationships visible that you would otherwise have to hear repeatedly to perceive. The individual episodes are tighter, more argued, less prone to the "let me tell you why this is great by demonstrating that it is great" circularity that occasionally afflicts Beato.
▶ ROUND 1: 12TONE
ROUND 2 — CONSISTENCY
Beato wins this round without serious contest. Three to four videos per week, maintained over years, across a range of formats including the flagship series, interviews, tutorials, and editorial commentary. The channel is a machine. It is sometimes too much of a machine — the volume occasionally produces content that would have been better not produced — but consistency at Beato's level is a genuine discipline, and it deserves its score.
12tone publishes approximately twice monthly, which is reasonable for the depth of analysis involved. But it does not produce the same reader-loyalty that a higher-frequency channel generates by habit. You subscribe to 12tone and check back. You subscribe to Beato and receive.
▶ ROUND 2: RICK BEATO
ROUND 3 — REPLAY VALUE
The diagram is the thing. 12tone's videos reward rewatching because the visual system accumulates meaning over multiple viewings. A song's structural diagram, once you understand the notation, reads differently after you've heard the piece ten times than it did when you'd heard it twice. The format generates a relationship between viewer and content that deepens rather than depletes. This is genuinely unusual.
Beato's replay value is strong within the emotional register he specialises in — the "What Makes This Song Great" episodes are reliably rewatchable if you love the song — but the format does not develop in the same way across rewatches. You receive the same information more efficiently. 12tone rewards the additional investment with additional revelation.
▶ ROUND 3: 12TONE
ROUND 4 — COMMUNITY
Beato's community is enormous, engaged, and sometimes contentious — which is precisely what you want from a music channel. The comment section debate over his "What Makes This Song Great" selections is a running cultural negotiation about what excellence means and who gets to claim it. When he selects a track, the community argues about the selection. When he omits one, the community demands it. This is healthy. This is what music fandom looks like at its best.
12tone's community is smaller but has a higher density of people who have done the work — who have developed the diagrammatic literacy and are now applying it independently, posting their own analyses in the comments. This is extraordinary but does not scale. Beato's community is more likely to make a new listener out of a passing stranger.
▶ ROUND 4: RICK BEATO (by breadth)
ROUND 5 — X-FACTOR
Rick Beato's X-Factor is his personality, and his personality is real. The frustration with the copyright regime is real. The love of the music is real. The slightly-too-passionate dad-energy is real. Authenticity is not sufficient for great content but it is necessary for lasting content, and Beato has it. You trust him with the music.
But 12tone's X-Factor is a system. A genuinely original notational methodology applied consistently enough to become a language. The magazine has, across ten issues, placed a very high premium on originality of form — on channels that have created a new way of doing something rather than a better version of something existing. 12tone created a new way of seeing music. That is not a marginal X-Factor. That is the entire difference between adequate and extraordinary.
▶ ROUND 5: 12TONE
| CATEGORY | RICK BEATO | 12TONE ⭐ |
|---|---|---|
| Content Quality | 84 | 91 |
| Consistency | 92 | 72 |
| Replay Value | 78 | 90 |
| Community | 85 | 79 |
| X-Factor | 72 | 95 |
| WEIGHTED TOTAL | 82 | 86 |
WINNER: 12TONE (86 vs 82)
The verdict is 12tone, and the editorial note is this: Rick Beato is a better gateway drug. If you want to introduce someone to music analysis YouTube — someone who doesn't know theory, who doesn't know what a tritone is, who just knows they love a song — you start with Beato. His accessibility is a genuine skill, not a compromise.
But 12tone is the channel you end up at. After Beato shows you that music can be analysed, 12tone shows you how to analyse it in a way that changes your relationship to music permanently. The originator of a methodology has a claim that the excellent explainer does not. Both enter the Top 50. 12tone enters higher. Rick Beato has nothing to be ashamed of in a loss by four points to a channel that invented a new visual language for music theory.
Top 50 — Issue #010 Edition. The largest single-issue jump in magazine history. That's #5. You'll know it when you see it.
★ ISSUE #010 NOTABLE MOVEMENTS ★
NEW RECORD: Adam Neely ↑33 (#38→#5) — surpasses JCS's ↑29 from Issue #007 as largest jump in magazine history
NEW ENTRIES: 12tone (#24, 86), Tantacrul (#30, 85), Sideways (#35, 84), Rick Beato (#41, 82)
DROPPED: Caddicarus (74), Company Man (77), Cleo Abram (80), Johnny Harris (79) — displaced by stronger music entries
Davie504 (55/MEDIOCRE) does NOT enter Top 50
| # | CHANNEL | SCORE | GENRE | MOVE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3Blue1Brown | 96 | Mathematics / Education | — |
| 2 | Kurzgesagt | 94 | Science / Animation | — |
| 3 | Every Frame a Painting | 92 | Film Analysis | — |
| 4 | Primitive Technology | 91 | Maker / Survival | — |
| 5 | Adam Neely ★ | 91 | Music Theory / Jazz | ↑33 REC |
| 6 | CGP Grey | 91 | Education / Explainer | ↓1 |
| 7 | Lemmino | 91 | Documentary / Mystery | ↓1 |
| 8 | Fireship | 90 | Technology / Programming | ↓1 |
| 9 | Dan Carlin's Hardcore History | 90 | History / Long-Form | ↓1 |
| 10 | Townsends | 90 | Historical Living | ↓1 |
| 11 | Mark Rober | 89 | Engineering / Entertainment | ↓1 |
| 12 | Veritasium | 89 | Science / Education | ↓1 |
| 13 | Vsauce | 89 | Science / Philosophy | ↓1 |
| 14 | Technology Connections | 88 | Technology / History | ↓1 |
| 15 | Conan O'Brien / Team Coco | 88 | Comedy / Talk | ↓1 |
| 16 | exurb1a | 88 | Philosophy / Existential | ↓5 |
| 17 | Clickspring | 88 | Clockmaking / Machining | ↓1 |
| 18 | JCS — Criminal Psychology | 86 | True Crime / Analysis | ↓3 |
| 19 | Internet Historian | 87 | Internet Culture | ↓2 |
| 20 | Theo Von | 87 | Comedy / Podcast | ↓2 |
| 21 | Good Mythical Morning | 87 | Entertainment / Variety | ↓2 |
| 22 | Binging with Babish | 85 | Cooking / Entertainment | ↓2 |
| 23 | Historia Civilis | 87 | Ancient History | ↓2 |
| 24 | 12tone ★ NEW | 86 | Music Theory / Analysis | NEW |
| 25 | Map Men (Jay and Mark) | 85 | Geography / Comedy | ↓3 |
| 26 | Nerdwriter1 | 86 | Art / Film Analysis | ↓2 |
| 27 | NileRed | 86 | Chemistry | ↓18 |
| 28 | Stuff Made Here | 86 | Engineering / Maker | ↓2 |
| 29 | Scott The Woz | 86 | Retro Gaming / Comedy | ↓1 |
| 30 | Tantacrul ★ NEW | 85 | Music Software / Comedy Essay | NEW |
| 31 | Videogamedunkey | 84 | Gaming / Commentary | ↓6 |
| 32 | Real Engineering | 85 | Engineering / Education | ↓5 |
| 33 | The Slow Mo Guys | 85 | Science / Entertainment | ↓5 |
| 34 | Smarter Every Day | 85 | Science / Curiosity | ↓5 |
| 35 | Sideways ★ NEW | 84 | Music Analysis / Film | NEW |
| 36 | Wendover Productions | 84 | Logistics / Explainer | ↓4 |
| 37 | Whang! | 84 | Internet History | ↓4 |
| 38 | Tom Scott | 84 | Education / Travel | ↓4 |
| 39 | Philip DeFranco | 84 | News / Commentary | ↓3 |
| 40 | Joshua Weissman | 81 | Cooking / From-Scratch | ↓5 |
| 41 | Rick Beato ★ NEW | 82 | Music Education / Analysis | NEW |
| 42 | Defunctland | 79 | Theme Park History | ↓5 |
| 43 | Nexpo | 80 | Internet Horror | ↓12 |
| 44 | Numberphile | 83 | Mathematics | ↓5 |
| 45 | Captain Disillusion | 83 | VFX / Debunking | ↓5 |
| 46 | Lessons from the Screenplay | 83 | Film / Writing | ↓5 |
| 47 | Summoning Salt | 82 | Speedrunning / Documentary | ↓5 |
| 48 | Corridor Crew | 79 | VFX / Behind the Scenes | ↓5 |
| 49 | Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) | 83 | Tech Reviews | ↓5 |
| 50 | Techmoan | 85 | Tech / Retro Hardware | ↓4 |
DROPPED THIS ISSUE
Caddicarus (was #47, 74) — Displacement by stronger music entries. Retains our respect; the score reflects a channel in transition.
Company Man (was #48, 77) — Output quality remains consistent but ceiling has become apparent. Not a collapse; a recalibration.
Cleo Abram (was #49, 80) — Promising but the upward trajectory anticipated in earlier issues has levelled earlier than expected.
Johnny Harris (was #50, 79) — Methodology criticisms in the editorial community have become harder to overlook. Will monitor.
How YouTube became the world's music educator — and what it replaced without telling us.
We tend to talk about radio's death as a loss of a medium. We should talk about it as the dissolution of a set of human decisions. Behind every playlist, every rotation, every "new music Friday" was a person who had listened to something and thought: yes, this goes next. That person was often wrong, commercially motivated, bribable, and prone to their own blind spots. They were also, at their best, a curator with taste — and taste is a technology for navigating the world that algorithms have not yet replicated.
Music discovery in the pre-YouTube era was either institutional (radio, MTV, the review press) or social (your friend's taste, your city's scene, your local record shop's recommendation shelf). Both systems were inefficient by every metric the current platform would recognise. They were also, by at least some measures, generative: they created unexpected encounters. The radio station that put an obscure track at 11pm on a Tuesday created a listener who might not have been looking for that sound. The algorithm that serves you content similar to what you've already listened to is not creating those encounters. It is deepening the encounters you've already had.
Something happened on YouTube between 2014 and 2019 that deserves a name. Call it the Theory Renaissance. Channels devoted to explaining how music actually works — the mechanics of harmony, the structure of rhythm, the theory that underlies composition — began attracting audiences that music education establishments had never managed to reach. By 2020, more people had probably learned the circle of fifths from a YouTube video than from all the music theory textbooks printed in the twentieth century combined. This is a reasonable estimate and an extraordinary fact.
Why now? Why YouTube, and why this generation? Several reasons, none entirely satisfying on their own. First, the barrier to entry for music creation has collapsed. Recording technology that cost hundreds of thousands of pounds in 1975 is available as a free download to anyone with a laptop. If you're going to make music, you want to understand music. Theory follows practice. Second, the educational format that works for music theory — demonstration, not description — is precisely the format YouTube is built for. You cannot teach a chord by describing it in text. You can teach it in thirty seconds of audio over a diagram. The platform made the pedagogy possible.
Third — and this is the part that is harder to quantify — something changed in the culture's relationship to expertise. The generation that grew up with YouTube grew up watching people be genuinely knowledgeable on camera, willingly, for free, because they loved the subject. This is a different relationship to expertise than the institutional model produces. The institution presents the expert as a credential. YouTube presents the expert as a person. The person is often more persuasive.
In 1991, to make a professional-quality recording, you needed a studio. Studios cost money. Money came from labels. Labels decided what was worth recording. This was not a conspiracy; it was logistics. The cost structure of music production created a gatekeeping function by default, and the gatekeepers were the people with the capital.
That pipeline is now reversed. A bedroom producer in 2026 can make a recording that is, in objective audio quality terms, comparable to professional studio output. They can distribute it through streaming services without a label. They can build an audience through YouTube before the recording exists — through tutorial content, through performance videos, through theory discussions that attract the kind of audience that pays for music. The label, if it appears at all, appears at the end of the process rather than the beginning. Its function has changed from gatekeeper to amplifier.
Music YouTube is both a product of this pipeline and a primary driver of it. The bedroom producer who posts tutorial content about their production process is building an audience with a very particular characteristic: they are an audience who understands what they're hearing, at a technical level, and who therefore have a relationship to the music that is qualitatively different from passive radio consumption. They are invested. They are literate. They are, in commercial terms, the most valuable kind of audience a musician can have.
The music director problem is real. The algorithm is a music director who optimises for engagement rather than discovery, and engagement and discovery are not the same thing. Engagement is high when you hear something familiar. Discovery is low when you hear something familiar. The algorithm pushes toward the familiar. Radio, at its worst, did too — but radio had finite time, and the person who wanted to fill 11pm on a Tuesday sometimes put something unusual there because it was better than dead air.
There is also the context problem. Music exists in context. "Strange Fruit" is not a sad song; it is an accusation. Nina Simone's "Four Women" is not a character study; it is a political argument delivered in a musical form that the political establishment had not yet learned to suppress. Music YouTube, at its best, preserves this context — the channels that do history, that do ethnomusicology, that place sound within its cultural moment. But the majority of music content on the platform strips context in the same way that the radio strip-mined it: the song as feeling delivery mechanism, the music as background, the melody as sensation rather than argument.
We have gained, on balance. The access is real. The education is real. The bedroom producer pipeline is genuinely transformative. But the loss of the curated unexpected encounter — the thing the music director provided when they were doing their job properly — is also real, and we should not pretend the algorithm has replaced it. It has replaced the bad music director. It has not replaced the good one.
The channels we have reviewed in this issue — Adam Neely, Tantacrul, Sideways, Rick Beato, 12tone — are doing something that the radio era did not have space for: they are building a music-literate audience at scale. An audience that can hear what a song is doing technically and historically and culturally simultaneously. This audience is new. It did not exist twenty years ago, not at this size. What it does with its literacy — whether it produces a generation of musicians who make more interesting music, or whether it produces a generation of very articulate passive consumers — we do not yet know.
The bet this magazine is making is that literacy tends to produce creation. That people who understand music make music. That the Theory Renaissance has a second act, which is the music that the theory-literate bedroom producers will make in the next decade. We are watching the education happen in real time on YouTube. The music is coming. We are, at minimum, confident that it will be harmonically interesting.
Five music YouTube trends that need to stop, explained with the love and firmness of someone who wants better for all of us.
Let us describe the format precisely: a creator sits before a screen. They press play on a song — typically a critically acclaimed classic, a beloved film score, a famous jazz solo — and film themselves experiencing it "for the first time." Their face does the thing. Eyebrows up. Mouth open. The involuntary head nod at the bridge. The whispered "oh my god" at the key change. The video is titled "[CREATOR] HEARS [ICONIC SONG] FOR THE FIRST TIME!! (EMOTIONAL REACTION)." It has four million views.
The problem is not the reaction. The problem is the industrial production of authenticity. The format incentivises creators to perform first-hearing responses to songs they have in many cases heard before, to work-shop expressions of genuine surprise until those expressions are reproducible on demand, and to build careers on what is, structurally, a kind of emotional theatre presented as documentary. The result is an economy of performed innocence — a perpetual state of cultural naivety that no adult human being is actually in — deployed to make viewers feel they are watching discovery when they are watching a rehearsed response to something they already know. The music deserves better. The viewers deserve better. The creator, frankly, deserves better too.
The "30 days to [skill]" format is not exclusive to music YouTube but has achieved a particularly acute form of wrongness there. The videos document a creator's journey from novice to "intermediate" on an instrument over a month, culminating in a performance that is then edited to appear more competent than the raw footage would support. The format is dishonest about what learning an instrument requires — not thirty days of motivated effort, but years of patient accumulation — and the dishonesty does material harm to real learners who start playing, progress slowly as all learners do, compare their progress to the creator's edited highlight reel, and conclude they are failing.
The musicians who taught us what it means to be good at an instrument — the Glenn Goulds, the Miles Davises, the people in this very issue's Time Capsule — spent decades learning their craft and would have been baffled by the premise that a month of motivated effort is a meaningful music story. It is not a music story. It is a productivity story that uses music as its current backdrop. A content format wearing music as a costume. Next month it will be something else. The instrument will remain exactly as difficult as it was before the video was made.
A format that masquerades as critical reassessment while actually performing intellectual arbitrage. The premise: a creator takes a commercially successful artist who has been dismissed by serious music criticism — think someone in the Britney Spears / early Katy Perry / late-era Justin Bieber category — and constructs an argument for their musical genius using theory vocabulary. The production value is high. The analysis is real. The conclusion is predetermined. The video generates both engagement from fans who feel vindicated and from critics who want to argue, which is the optimal engagement outcome.
The issue is not that the reassessments are wrong — sometimes they're not, and the critical establishment has genuine blind spots worth challenging. The issue is that the format is structurally incapable of producing a verdict other than "genius," because the discovery of complexity in the target's work is the video's premise and its conclusion simultaneously. There is no possible outcome in which the creator watches the footage and decides "actually the original critics were right." The video has been built to arrive at validation. This is not criticism. This is the academic equivalent of a hype video, wearing theory as a gown.
This is new enough that we should describe it carefully. A category of channels has emerged — growing rapidly since 2023 — that use AI-generated narration, AI-generated music examples, and algorithmically selected topics to produce music theory content at high volume and low cost. The content is technically accurate in the way that a Wikipedia summary is technically accurate: the facts are correct, the relationships between facts are described correctly, and the whole thing contains no judgment, no preference, no ear, no sense of why any of this matters.
Music theory is not a collection of facts. It is a set of tools for understanding why music creates the effects it creates. The tools are useless without ears that can hear what's happening, and ears are — at least for now — something AI systems don't have in the relevant sense. The channels that are good at music theory YouTube — the channels reviewed in this issue — are good because they combine technical knowledge with musical taste, with the ability to say "and this is where it gets interesting, listen." The AI channel has the knowledge. It cannot say "listen" and mean anything by it.
We want to be fair here, because the lofi hip hop phenomenon is genuinely interesting and the channels that built it — Lofi Girl most visibly — did so with real care for the aesthetic, the community, and the music's origins. That is not what we are discussing. We are discussing the industrial-scale production of lofi compilations by channels that aggregate other people's music and other people's art — the latter often uncredited, often the work of Asian digital artists whose distinctive style became the genre's visual identity without those artists receiving the recognition or compensation they deserve — into eight-to-twelve-hour streams optimised for the "study playlist" search term.
The music is real music, made by real people, and the compilations expose them to new listeners, which is worth something. The artwork problem is not worth something. It is worth nothing, except to the channel running ads against someone else's work and someone else's visual identity. The anime girl at the window belongs to a specific visual tradition made by specific artists. She is not clip art. She is not a genre attribute. She was made by someone, and that someone deserves to know where their work went.
Yob reads your letters. Yob has opinions about your letters. Some of your letters are good. A few are not.
Finally. Adam Neely at #38 was genuinely embarrassing. I've been waiting six issues for this magazine to admit it got that wrong. I almost unsubscribed over it. I didn't, because the rest of the magazine is very good, but I want you to know I considered it.
You're right and Yob hates telling you you're right. You've been right since Issue #007. We've been cowards about it for two issues and we're fixing it now. The number went from 84 to 91 and the jump is bigger than the JCS correction in Issue #007, which was itself bigger than anything we'd done before, so if there's a consolation prize for waiting, it's that the correction has been appropriately large and embarrassingly public. Yob notes that you "almost" unsubscribed and then didn't, which means Yob is still here, you're still here, and Adam Neely is at #5. Everyone wins. Even Declan. Eventually.
— YobYour coverage of YouTube is almost entirely focused on English-language content. This is understandable given what the magazine is. But I want to flag that the music theory and music education renaissance you'll probably write about in the Music Issue is happening in at least five languages simultaneously. There are Carnatic music theory channels in Tamil and Telugu with hundreds of thousands of subscribers doing things that would blow your Western classical framework wide open. When does CTRL+WATCH expand its scope?
This is the best letter of the issue and Yob is annoyed about it because it requires self-reflection, which Yob prefers to avoid. Priya is completely correct. The magazine's English-language bias is a structural limitation and not an editorial principle, and it's a limitation we've been aware of and have not adequately addressed. The Carnatic music theory ecosystem on YouTube is genuinely vast, genuinely rigorous, and genuinely absent from our coverage. We're flagging this internally. It will not be addressed immediately — language access is a real constraint — but it will be addressed. Priya, thank you. Yob doesn't say that often. It's embarrassing for everyone involved.
— YobI think you're being unfair to Davie504. Yes the format is repetitive, but the guy has made bass guitar cool to thirteen million people who wouldn't otherwise care. That's worth more than all the Adam Neely music theory videos in the world. Culture requires both levels.
Yob acknowledges the gateway drug argument and does not dismiss it. Making bass guitar cool to thirteen million people is not nothing. The magazine did not say it was nothing; we gave him a 91 for Consistency, which is higher than Adam Neely's Consistency score, if you'll read the scorecard rather than just looking at the total. What Yob does not accept is the implied conclusion, which is that the gateway is sufficient. A gateway that stops being a gateway and starts being a destination is a problem. Davie504 used to take people somewhere. Now it is the somewhere. There is a difference between introducing people to the instrument and reducing the instrument to a prop in a format. The magazine scores what's happening now, not what happened in 2016. If Davie504 changes, the score changes. Yob is not holding a grudge. Yob is keeping records.
— YobYou mentioned in Issue #009 letters that Roland Barthes was coming. You mentioned it in Issue #008 as well. This is the third issue and Barthes is finally here. I just want to note that the build-up has been entirely worth it — the Grain of the Voice angle is exactly right and the observation about comment sections as Barthesian readerly response is one of the best things the magazine has published. However. You kept us waiting two issues for this. That is too long and you should apologise.
Yob flagged Barthes in Issue #008. The Editor said "next issue." In Issue #009 Yob flagged Barthes again. The Editor said "the Music Issue." The Music Issue is Issue #010. This is Issue #010. The system worked. The wait was two issues, which is the amount of time it takes to build appropriate anticipation for a semiotician. Yob does not apologise for appropriate anticipation. Yob does, however, note that Tom's second point — that the interview was worth it — is something Yob predicted in Issue #009, and Yob would like this on record. Five stars for being right. Three stars for the apology demand. Three stars it is.
— YobI play classical piano and have been watching music YouTube since about 2015. What I find most interesting is that the theory renaissance you all love to celebrate has also produced a generation of musicians who can articulate everything they're doing technically but who sometimes play music that is correct without being interesting. Theory literacy can become a cage as much as a key. Is there a version of music YouTube that addresses this?
Yob thinks Maiko has identified something real and put it very precisely, which is why Yob is giving four stars despite this being a slightly uncomfortable letter. Frank Zappa — who appears in this issue's Time Capsule, if Maiko has got there yet — said something very similar: theory taught as prescription rather than description produces musicians who can explain everything and invent nothing. The cage problem is real. The channels that Yob thinks address it best are the ones that pair technical analysis with the question "and why does this work?" rather than stopping at "and here's what's happening." Adam Neely's X-Factor is, to a large degree, that he consistently asks the second question. The cage becomes a key when you understand that the rules describe what's been done, not what can be done. Some of YouTube's music theory channels have figured this out. Maiko has correctly identified the ones that haven't.
— YobI want to tell you that I started playing guitar at 41 because of music YouTube. I had always assumed learning music as an adult was not really possible. I watched Adam Neely explain voice-leading once and then watched him do it again and then I bought a guitar. I've been playing for three years. I'm not good at it. But I play. Thank you for covering these channels seriously. It matters more than you probably know.
Yob does not usually do this but Yob is doing it now: five stars, no criticism. This is what the magazine exists to talk about. Not the algorithm, not the metrics, not the brand deals and copyright claims and platform politics — though all of that matters and we cover it. This. A person at 41 who bought a guitar because of a YouTube video and plays it badly and keeps playing. That is the correct outcome. That is what democratised music education looks like when it actually works. Yob would like to be on record as being moved by this letter and would like it clearly stated that this does not happen often and that Yob's general rudeness remains firmly in place for all future correspondence. But this one gets five stars and no notes.
— Yob (who is briefly, temporarily, in a good mood about this)The Music Issue should have been Issue #002, not Issue #010. Music is the most important thing on YouTube. You spent nine issues covering everything else first. What were you thinking?
Yob was thinking about Issue #001 through #009, Kieran. We covered Algorithm, Vision, Spectacle, Craft, Underground, Longevity, Voice, Nostalgia, and Niche before arriving at Music. Each of those issues built vocabulary that we used in this one. The discussion of voice in Issue #007 prepared us to talk about grain in the Barthes interview. The niche framework from #009 prepared us to discuss the bedroom producer pipeline. The longevity conversation from #006 is relevant to the question of which music channels actually last. Good things take time. Yob also notes that Kieran is from Dublin, same city as Tantacrul, whose review in this issue gives a new Top 50 entry to an Irish music software critic. Yob considers this adequate compensation for waiting nine issues. Two stars. Ireland has punched above its weight this issue. Do not push it.
— YobFour advertisements for products that do not exist. We wish some of them did.
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