YouTube Music Awards

Overview

The YouTube Music Awards is an online music video award show presented by YouTube to honor the most influential artists of the year on the video-sharing platform.

Background

On September 30th, 2013, YouTube announced its plan to host the first YouTube Music Awards with a promotional video introducing actor Jason Schwartzman as the co-host of the ceremony (shown below, left). On October 22nd, YouTube released another promotional video starring the co-host Reggie Watson, which revealed the list of nominees in six categories and asked the viewers to vote for the winning acts. (shown below, right).

History

2014 YouTube Music Awards

On November 3rd, the inaugural YouTube Music Awards commenced at Pier 36 in New York City, featuring Jason Schwartzman and Reggie Watt as the co-hosts with creative direction by director Spike Jonze, in addition to a series of live performances by Lady Gaga, Eminem (shown below, left), Arcade Fire, Avicii, Tyler the Creator, M.I.A. and Lindsey Stirling (shown below, right). According to Variety^[6], the livestream event drew as many as 220,000 viewers online.

Nominees

Winners

• Girls' Generation won The Video of the Year for their 2013 music video "I Got a Boy."
• Macklemore won the YouTube Breakthrough Award for the Thrift Shop music video.
• Lindsey Stirling and Pentatonix won the Response of the Year for the video “Radioactive”
• Walk Off The Earth and KRNFX won the YouTube Phenomenon Award for their cover of I Knew You Were Trouble.
• DeStorm won the Innovation Prize for the "See Me Standing" music video.
• Rapper Eminem won the Artist of the Year.

News Media Coverage

During the ceremony, the tech news blog TechCrunch^[1] liveblogged the event, noting that the program was "chaotic." After the show, several news sites published articles about the program, including ABC,^[2] USA Today,^[5] Rolling Stone^[3] and The New York Times,^[4] who described the event as confused, bizarre and unorganized.

2015 YouTube Music Awards

On March 23rd, 2015, YouTube hosted its second music awards show to honor 50 influential recording artists and acts from both mainstream and Internet backgrounds. Unlike the inaugural ceremony in 2013, which included a people's choice poll and a live show in New York City, the winners were selected based on growth in views, subscribers and user engagement over the previous six months and announced entirely on YouTube with each award presented in a series by celebrity vlogger Tyler Oakley.

Winners

In alphabetical order.

Search Interest

External References