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

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.