Sideways

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.

Sideways hears what the music is doing while watching what everything else is doing, and finds the moment they diverge. This is rare. This is the entire job.

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.

The replay value is genuinely high for the essays that take the scenic route. A video about a film score that you watched before seeing the film watches differently after; one you watched before studying music theory watches differently again. The archive is not a web of the same interlocking density as some of the upper-tier channels on this list, but it compounds. A rewatch of the How to Train Your Dragon score analysis after you’ve seen the episode on Mad Max is a structurally different experience than the first watch. That accumulation is real, even if it’s more linear than rhizomatic.

The channel entered the Top 50 as a new entry at #35 in Issue #010, which reviewed five music channels as a themed block. Within that grouping, Sideways sits precisely where it should: below Adam Neely (whose X-Factor is without peer in music YouTube) and solidly above channels that cover adjacent territory with less precision. The niche is not crowded. When someone wants to understand what a film score is actually doing — not how it was recorded, not what key it’s in, but why it works on you at this exact moment in the story — Sideways is the place. That specificity is worth 84 points. It might be worth more if the channel ever leans fully into the harder arguments.

The verdict is EXCELLENT without hesitation. The ceiling is demonstrably higher. Whether the ceiling gets hit depends on whether the channel trusts its audience enough to take the long way round more often.