Is “Watching and Copying” the New “Listening and Copying”?

Situating YouTube in How Popular Musicians Learn

Abstract

This article examines the role of YouTube in how young popular musicians learn in the twenty-first century. I frame this question within the dual legacies of Lucy Green’s (2001) findings about “listening and copying” among popular musicians and Marc Prensky’s (2001a, 2001b) “digital natives” hypothesis. I present an ethnographic description of a music learning encounter that raises questions as to whether there is a generational change occurring, one which shifts the primary mode of informal music learning from listening and copying to watching and copying via YouTube videos. I argue that learning via YouTube constitutes a form of informal learning, one situated within a longer history of learning strategies based in available technologies and resources. I suggest that in the midst of this continuity, digital videos present at least one new phenomenon within popular music education: the ability to abstract single lines and riffs from their musical contexts.