Maybe this is just a function of getting older, like how everyone thinks the music from their teenage years is the best, but man – nobody can tell me early YouTube wasn't something special.
It was gold. See below for a small sampling of videos from the years 2006-2007, as a demonstration:
Gold, right? And that five-bullet list is only a single snowflake on the top tip of a massive iceberg. Early YouTube goes deep. (If you'd like to send me more videos as proof of just how deep it goes, please do.)
All of these early videos have a weird sort of purity to them. It's not the purity of total, self-unaware ignorance; all of them, even "Charlie Bit My Finger," are clearly performed, by which I mean that the people being filmed are obviously aware of and catering to the camera. They know what they're doing; it's not "candid camera" or anything. It's all schtick.
But it all feels several laps of recursive, spiraling self-awareness back from where we are today.
I think early YouTube was pure performances – just that. We've moved on since then, fallen deeper. It's 2026; we can't just perform or make jokes or watch shows. We've got to perform performances and make jokes about jokes and watch shows about shows. Can I interest you in Reality Check: Behind the Scenes of America's Next Top Model, a documentary show about a reality show? If that's too much for you, don't worry, you can get the gist by watching the reaction video.
(Speaking of reaction videos: Bo Burnham says what I've tried to say above in his "Unpaid Intern" skit, except of course he says it 1000x better. But still there's no escaping the loop, because isn't Bo's skit – and this email – just one more example of the thing it's commenting on? God help us.)
Anyway, I swear I'm not trying, consciously, at least, to make this some meta-commentary about internet culture. I sat down to write today's email with one simple point in mind:
I think internet virality, of the kind these early YouTube videos exemplify, is totally dead.
Here's why I think that (and what I mean).
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First, some context:
Virality was always a little bit of a myth.
Early internet culture had this precious idea that you could become semi-famous solely on the basis of the quality of your content. It was word-of-mouth based: If you made something good or funny or weird enough, people would share it with their friends. Those friends would share it their friends, and so on down the line until you were famous.
It sounds nice, but even in early-internet days, this was never the reality.
As Derek Thompson explains in Hitmakers, popular things become popular not when they're shared by normal people, but when they're shared on powerful platforms. In other words, virality has never really been about quality; it's always been more about connections.
The ice bucket challenge took off when celebrities participated. Viral videos went "viral" when Justin Bieber retweeted them. You get the idea.
Don't get me wrong – it's not that quality doesn't play a factor in popularity. Absolutely, it does. There has to be some initial word-of-mouth growth to get any traction at all, and the better a thing is, the better its chances. It's pretty hard to get a bad thing a big platform.
But quality has always been a smaller factor than we'd like to think, even way back in 2006.
Today, things are even worse.
It's not that quality no longer matters; it's that people no longer are its arbiters. In 2006, your social media feed either didn't exist, or it was made up entirely of posts from people you followed. In 2026, your feeds are endless scrolls of content designed to addict interest you, most of it without a single face you'll recognize.
For something to become popular, it still needs to be shared on powerful platforms. But people don't hold the reins of those platforms anymore. You can no longer win by catering to your friends or your fans or Justin Bieber; you have to cater to algorithms.
Which is why you see posts like these:
I have nothing against these sorts of posts; they're a natural outcome given the reward structure of social media, and honestly, I make plenty of these sorts of posts myself.
But notice how algorithm-aware they are. They're three laps of self-awareness further on from 2007 YouTube. They're not pure performances anymore; they're performances about performances, comments on comments. They're not made to be shareable (i.e., good, funny, weird), but to find their way into the right feeds.
In 2009, high-performing music content looked like Okay Go's treadmill music video. Today, it looks like a prayer to Mark Zuckerberg's robots.
There are, as I see it, three reasons why virality is dead, and they're all sort of related.
- Algorithms are the arbiters of popularity rather than people. So it's harder to network your way to virality.
- The mainstream has shrunk. Media has fragmented into a billion niches, so it's harder to platform your way to virality.
- The quantity of content has ballooned exponentially. So it's harder for things to cut through the noise.
Today, even if you were to make an Okay-Go-treadmill-music-video – the sort of thing that is undeniably, objectively, very cool and interesting – it'd get drowned in the swirling vortex of a quadrillion other videos.
(And actually, now that I look: In 2026, Okay Go's YouTube channel is mostly "behind-the-scenes" and "explainer" content for the videos they filmed over a decade ago. Makes sense.)
So, virality is dead.
But before you accuse me of being all old-man grumpiness and doom-and-gloom: despite what you may think, I'm really not bothered about this. Actually, in most of the ways that matter, I'd say the death of virality is a good thing.
Because virality was always a bit of a false summit, anyway. Sure, some people built years of artistry on the aftermath of their viral moments, but far more people wasted years of artistry chasing their viral moments that never came.
Even in 2007, you were better off focusing on consistency and connection. Now that virality is no longer an option, you don't have much of a choice.
I've got more to say on this, but I think I'd better end things here for now, because I need to go eat lunch before I go into bunch of Zoom calls.
So yeah, RIP to virality and the golden age of YouTube. But long live 1,000 true fans and your focus on what matters: making beautiful music.
– Jon
Jon Anderson
Founder @ Two Story Media
Surprisingly Bad @ Scrabble
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100% Human Guarantee
I wrote this, not AI.
Today's random photo: My most recent photo is a screenshot of a recipe for roasted vegetables. I take screenshots when I cook because, like all normal people, I hate the inescapable pop-up ads on recipe blogs.
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P.S. – News thing! Starting two weeks* from today, I'll be running a live class called Music Ads 101. I ran this last fall, and it was great.
You can join by joining our Music Marketing Club; club members get access to all of my live trainings.
P.P.S. – Several people responded to last week's email about Meta ads metrics with questions about the final stat I mentioned, saves / conversions. A few things to clarify about that metric:
- Conversions are clicks on the landing page over to Spotify, tracked in Ads Manager. Saves are saves on the song on Spotify.
- 68% was the average rate I quoted, but the individual rates vary widely based on volume of traffic to the song (both in terms of ad traffic and Spotify traffic). In general, the more volume you have, the lower these sorts of rates will be – and that's not a sign that things aren't working, but that they are. A low rate alone is not a red flag; a low rate and low traffic volume is.
- Also, when I wrote last week's email, I'd collected about a third of the data. The average rate of saves / conversions (which I quoted at 68%) has since fallen to 55%. I'd say if you're above 50%, you're doing really well.
Okay that's all, hope that helps.
*I had originally planned to do this class one week earlier – but for scheduling reasons, that won't work, so it'll now be the week of the 13th.