Music on YouTube: User engagement with traditional, user-appropriated and derivative videos

YouTube is the leading Internet video service and one of the most popular websites in 2014. Music videos hold top positions in different YouTube charts, but the music video types or engagement patterns with them have not been systematically studied. In this paper we present three studies that focus on YouTube music. We first show that music videos are the most popular content genre in YouTube. We then present a typology of traditional and user-generated music videos discovered in YouTube. It includes twelve subtypes of music videos under three main types: traditional, user-appropriated, and derivative. Last, we present findings on user engagement statistics that go beyond view, comment, and vote counts. These metrics show that while music videos gather more views, engagement differences with other content genres are miniscule. However, there are notable differences in engagement between different music video types. This is prominent between different artists on one hand, and between traditional and user-generated videos on the other. We synthesize these findings by discussing the importance of user-generated videos in YouTube's music ecosystem.