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AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
perform popular songs and mediate these performances in ways that cannot
compete with large-scale industry aesthetics. Instead, they communicate a
specific set of skills using tools that adhere to the particularity of YouTube
as a social media platform. These videos are democratically available to the
mass audience and therefore may become as popular as commercial products, like WOTE’s paradigmatic cover of “Somebody That I Used to Know.”
The process of adaptation in this case is twofold since the performance
may be identified as a cover, but the visual settings are not adaptations of
the source song’s official music video. Instead, the visual settings of these
videos sometimes borrow visual codes from practices specific to radio
visualization or are simply variations of the bedroom musical performance,
which may include vlogging elements. Therefore, these videos provide a
visual experience independent from industry practices of commercial
music video production, or they relate more significantly to professional
material that is also made for the purposes of online viewing, such as
visualized radio covers.
Unlike the classification systems proposed by Mosser 50 and Magnus
et al., 51 YouTube cover song videos are, to a certain extent, examples of
adaptations that may not have a clear “departure” or “destination” and this is
partly because of today’s frequency and variety of re-covering, which is not
limited to well-known artists. YouTube performers may reference the source
song (wrongly or otherwise), but they don’t always wish to communicate
the (hi)story of this song or express a sense of devotion to the “owner” of the
song, as the above examples illustrate; rather, they wish to promote their
talents through a deliberate performance of the song. The above exchanges
point toward useful ways of looking at the journeys of familiar content
across media, especially those that are associated with how viewers view,
consume, and partake in the recycling of such content. While adaptation
studies scholars introduce or reintroduce models of study that highlight
dialogic processes and non-hierarchical ways of looking at adaptations, 52
YouTube viewers and users tell us that this might already be the norm in
some areas.
50 Mosser, “Cover songs.”
51 Cristyn Magnus, P.D. Magnus, and Christy Mag Uidhir, “Judging Covers,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71.4 (2013): 361–370.
52 See Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan’s influential edited volume Adaptations: From
Text to Screen and Screen to Text (London: Routledge, 1999) and Robert Stam’s essay “Beyond
Fidelity,” which introduces the intertextual dialogism approach within the context of adaptation
studies. Robert Stam. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” In Film Adaptation, edited
by James Naremore (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 54–78.
AdAptAtion in the Age of MediA ConvergenCe
perform popular songs and mediate these performances in ways that cannot
compete with large-scale industry aesthetics. Instead, they communicate a
specific set of skills using tools that adhere to the particularity of YouTube
as a social media platform. These videos are democratically available to the
mass audience and therefore may become as popular as commercial products, like WOTE’s paradigmatic cover of “Somebody That I Used to Know.”
The process of adaptation in this case is twofold since the performance
may be identified as a cover, but the visual settings are not adaptations of
the source song’s official music video. Instead, the visual settings of these
videos sometimes borrow visual codes from practices specific to radio
visualization or are simply variations of the bedroom musical performance,
which may include vlogging elements. Therefore, these videos provide a
visual experience independent from industry practices of commercial
music video production, or they relate more significantly to professional
material that is also made for the purposes of online viewing, such as
visualized radio covers.
Unlike the classification systems proposed by Mosser 50 and Magnus
et al., 51 YouTube cover song videos are, to a certain extent, examples of
adaptations that may not have a clear “departure” or “destination” and this is
partly because of today’s frequency and variety of re-covering, which is not
limited to well-known artists. YouTube performers may reference the source
song (wrongly or otherwise), but they don’t always wish to communicate
the (hi)story of this song or express a sense of devotion to the “owner” of the
song, as the above examples illustrate; rather, they wish to promote their
talents through a deliberate performance of the song. The above exchanges
point toward useful ways of looking at the journeys of familiar content
across media, especially those that are associated with how viewers view,
consume, and partake in the recycling of such content. While adaptation
studies scholars introduce or reintroduce models of study that highlight
dialogic processes and non-hierarchical ways of looking at adaptations, 52
YouTube viewers and users tell us that this might already be the norm in
some areas.
50 Mosser, “Cover songs.”
51 Cristyn Magnus, P.D. Magnus, and Christy Mag Uidhir, “Judging Covers,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71.4 (2013): 361–370.
52 See Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan’s influential edited volume Adaptations: From
Text to Screen and Screen to Text (London: Routledge, 1999) and Robert Stam’s essay “Beyond
Fidelity,” which introduces the intertextual dialogism approach within the context of adaptation
studies. Robert Stam. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” In Film Adaptation, edited
by James Naremore (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 54–78.