Just A Kid With A Dream In His Basement No More

YouTube is just one of the new media channels that has changed lives and taken people with amazing potential and talent and brought their magic to the masses.
After watching this video of a young guy from Brazil play a guitar solo, I am further reminded about the dramatic changes in the media landscape after only a couple of years. Check out this video called, Insanely Amazing Guitar Solo:

When I started in the music industry (back in the very-late eighties), there were countless stories regaled about the next Eddie Van Halen of the world. Young people, living in Suburbia, USA, sitting on the corner of their bed, practicing sixteen hours a day as posters of Guitar Gods like Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Steve Vai hung overhead.
Those kids with a dream now have a free and global media channel to strut their stuff. Whoever the young guitarist is in the video, you hardly get a glimpse of his face. In my humble opinion, he’s not doing it to get his “face” out there, he’s doing it to show his skill. He might even be interested in seeing how people rate him (four out of five stars with well over five thousand people rating him). Most importantly, almost one and half million people have viewed this clip.
Who knows where, exactly, he lives in Brazil, but an audience of over one million people (and growing) will probably be the biggest venue this Fret Master will ever play.
Videos like this remind me that YouTube is important to Marketers. It’s a fertile testing ground to see if your message, talent and content resonates with the world. It is an open channel that could take your idea off of the whiteboard and to the masses.
This young person and his guitar solo reminded me of a time when I wondered about all of this talent that is spending countless hours in a basement with no acknowledgement (and the odds of “getting out there” were very low), and how – in the short span of a few years – these online channels are now less about distribution and more about empowerment and experimentation.
Marketing has spent too long worrying about distribution. Marketers need to spend more time thinking about empowerment and experimentation. If you’re ever not sure that this is the right path, just come back here and watch this guy playing guitar.
I’ll bet Eddie, Jimmy and Vai are.