I first met Andy McKee at an acoustic music festival in Kansas in 2003. He is among several awesome fingerstyle guitar players including Tommy Emmanuel (see my Tommy Emmanuel interview), Neil Jacobs, Brian Henke, Peppino D’Agostino and others that don’t get mass media exposure. For several years these great players have labored with little or no media love. Yet when they play – some people will drive hundreds of miles to witness the art. It is a strange contradiction indeed.
One of Andy’s videos “Drifting” made it onto the front page of Youtube this week and has now received over 700,000 views! While it’s great that this occurred, it’s a sad reminder of a broken music industry that categorizes people much the same limiting way online recruiting does, not being seen by all of the people who might be interested in the competencies and skill set that a person offers! It’s great when you start to see these barriers and limiting beliefs starting to be broken, hopefully 2007 will be the year we see this happen in not only music, but also recruiting as well. If you like this video be sure to check out his remake of Toto’s “Africa”.
Very cool David! Thanks for sharing this video. With the power of the Internet and new technologies such as YouTube as well as new music distribution models, I think that musicians like Andy will be able to get more exposure without relying on the big music companies. You show this to be correct with the YouTube viewing stats.
David Dalka sent me this link. Very cool that you made it to the front page of youtube. You have a lot of talent.
Have you thought about broadcasting live and having a fan chat too. I thought I would recommend to you blogtv.ca I have a passion for social media and social networking. If you would like to connect with me please email
cheers
chris williams
chrisw_88@hotmail.com
[…] homepage. This is apparently an internal process at Youtube and the system is not transparent. Andy Mckee’s “Drifting” was added to the Youtube featured videos after thousands of views, while Mike Huckabee eating a hamburger named after him in NH yesterday […]