YouTube is a video sharing site which you've probably heard of. While there are many official videos by signed artists or by the film owners' copyrights, there is also a huge ecosystem of original "direct-to-YouTube" art created by the so called "YouTubers". They upload anything from bootleg videos of songs, to technical tutorials, to low cost covers (often just a man or a woman singing and playing a guitar, a piano or even an electric organ or A cappella), to parodies, to lyric videos, to live recordings of any musicians or comedians.
Now, some people still look down on YouTubers thinking that covers can never be better than the original, but having been introduced to the world of YouTube covers, I can often prove them wrong:
Naturally, there is a lot of junk on YouTube - Sturgeon's law ("ninety percent of anything is crap") is still true, and that may include my own YouTube channel.
One problem with YouTube is that many videos have been removed, or censored, or disappeared, or blocked in certain regions (often by automated filters). Some people like me try to use youtube-dl or similar downloaders to download every video that we like from YouTube, and while some die hard copyright puritans have looked down on that, I still support that as a way to battle censorship. [Google vs. youtube-dl]
While I do not condone the recent YouTube shooting (by a woman no less), I believe that YouTube has brought it upon themselves by the aggressive and irrational content filtering and removal, that many YouTube creators and users have been witnessing.
I believe that signed artists and creators (or the somewhat more professional ones) should emulate YouTubers and start indie channels where they post regular collaborations with other YouTubers: from the better known to the relatively obscure.
[Google vs. youtube-dl] Someone told me in a chat, that he believed that Google (who owns YouTube) will do a DMCA takedown for GitHub to censor youtube-dl, but even if they were stupid enough to do that (which I doubt), it likely would not completely stop youtube-dl, whose open source public domain source code has thousands of git clones and forks.