Garth Brooks Soundalikes, YouTube Misinformation, and Authenticity Politics

Abstract

Country musician Garth Brooks has long resisted digital distribution of his recordings, which remain unavailable on most streaming platforms. This artificial scarcity has led audiences to settle for virtually identical recordings performed by cover musicians. Known as soundalikes, these recordings garner hundreds of millions of streams across platforms. On YouTube, uploaders often post soundalikes with misleading titles, causing listeners to mistake soundalikes for original Brooks recordings. This widespread practice inspires users to debate the ethical, aesthetic, and economic implications of soundalikes using YouTube’s comments forum. This article uses text data mining to examine online reception for thirty-seven YouTube videos featuring Brooks and his soundalikes, comprising over 24,000 comments. Alienated from musical labor and absent authoritative paratexts and distribution networks, these listeners compensate by relying upon social media to fill in epistemological gaps and develop a new ethics of listening. Echoing historical discourses on artistic forgery, some listeners invest in exposing deception, posing as style experts whose sometimes erroneous attributions often spill over into negative aesthetic and ethical judgments. Yet others enjoy soundalikes as adequate alternatives, focusing on personal meaning or mimetic craft, thereby eroding the authority of the original recording as a uniquely expressive artifact. Broader user reflections on digital distribution reveal YouTube as a significant site of meaning-making, community formation, and epistemic danger. As deepfakes and other musical deceptions proliferate, this article demonstrates how deregulated social media distribution can destabilize previously straightforward questions of authorship and reshape attitudes toward artistic integrity and just listening habits.