“Stars” from the Tube

Abstract

“Stars” from the Tube (by Evgeny Dukov) deals with the new socio-cultural trend - individual artistic industry. It developed on the basis of appearance in the Internet of the Blog website (1990-s) and the YouTube video hosting (2000-s). Arisen independently of one another, they began to play a very important role in contemporary musical life: the bloggers became conductors of the new musical content that they would “catch” in the Internet; the technical capabilities of YouTube made saturation of that content simple, even for novice users. All this has led to the emergence of a new type of “stars”; they “break out” without any assistance of show business professionals, without competitions and festivals, but always with some initial aid of bloggers. The Internet audience finds something interesting for themselves in the creative work of the “stars”, which makes music critics, sociologists, and other specialists solve the problem of artistic preferences of the modern (mostly young) Internet audience. However, the bloggers themselves usually remain in the shadows. They unselfishly open to the web community and promote in the Internet any phenomenon which, from their point of view, can claim the status of artistic.