Child Stars Via YouTube – A New Trend to Discovering New Talent?
A long time ago Citytv launched “Speaker’s Corner”. Anybody could stop by and verbally express their opinion about anything. Some people were actually singing, while hoping to get noticed and make it big in the music business. And YES…BINGO! The band “Barenaked Ladies” were noticed, picked up by music industry professionals and then the band made a very significant mark, becoming icons in the music industry to date. Sounds like a fairy tale, huh? But that happened and it’s real. However, at that time it was quite sensational.
Today, we all own computers and we all can easily and quickly access YouTube. In a manner of speaking, it is a “Speaker’s Corner”, but in the convenience of our own home or at our desk at work. With that to be available, the well known manager, Scooter Braun was surfing the internet and YouTube in particular, when he discovered a young boy who is now the well known artist, Justin Bieber. The “Biebermania” took off and along this premise two young girls (Maria Lourdes Aragon of Winnepeg and Heather Russell of Toronto, Canada) were recently discovered. Maria was discovered by Lady Gaga, who was fascinated by the little girl performing her song “Born This Way” and Heather, outright got a record deal with none other than the former American Idol judge, Simon Cowell. This modern technology already helped a great deal to launch the now huge teenage artist, Justin Bieber, and those two girls are definitely along their way to stardom as well.
In my opinion, it’s absolutely amazing, as the music business for the last at least 20 years became nothing but a factory of artificially manufactured stars. Those so-called “stars” were mainly picked by their looks, ages, right connections, and the money put behind their careers. We all know that a lot of so-called “singing” could be fabricated in the high tech studios. And if the budget is adequate enough, the production will sound quite profound. Now we have the looks and good sounding studio recorded tracks and then what? Then, the majority of times we have an artist who cannot perform live or nevertheless resemble anything remotely close to what has been recorded. In their concerts, however, they have very knowledgeable sound engineers behind the stage, which are there on stand-by to pick up the sound which was originally recorded to substitute for the sound which is hardly coming out of the so-called manufactured “performer’s” mouth. Then no wonder well known sources such as the Toronto Sun, start publishing articles about those fabricated performers, in this instance Taylor Swift, calling them outright and outloud “tone deaf”.
“Thanks primarily to her stunningly tone-deaf Grammy performance, Swift ended up being the big story on Grammy night – but not in the way she had wished. Critical opinion of her three-song mini-set – which included a mercifully brief duet with Stevie Nicks on Fleetwood Mac’s Rhiannon – ranged from the somewhat diplomatic “painfully out of tune” to the slightly more pointed “off-key caterwauling.”-Darryl Sterdan
Justin Bieber, however,and the two new young female rising stars are truly and naturally talented. They were chosen for the right reasons and thus, hopefully down the road, they will not destroy our ears and turn us away from the concert arenas. However, being a vocal educator for over 3 decades, in my opinion the talent has to be supported with the proper knowledge, especially when it’s concerning the human voice.