This week on The Deep Dive: YouTube history could be bound to repeat itself, the nightmare scenario of realizing your Spotify has been hacked and won’t stop playing the same French Montana song on repeat, GoPros were fun until we realized our lives weren’t all that exciting plus editing videos is hard, there’s regular Greek life and then there’s Bama Greek life which may or may not be running underground secret societies that rig elections, and how Canada’s Enron went bust and brought Canadian pensions down with it.

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INTERNET

Why is YouTube like this? by Zackary Smigel (10:28)

If you’ve ever poked your head out of the video essay rabbit hole (speaking of which, subscribe to The Rabbit Hole here!) on YouTube dot com, you’ve probably noticed a certain type of video. You know the ones I’m talking about, the type of video the YouTube homepage suggests when you’re logged out of your account. The type of video made popular by a creator whose name rhymes with shmister shmeast. In this video, Zackary Smigel explains where these videos came from within the context of YouTube history and where the platform’s content will go from here. What is CoreCore and what century-old artistic movement does it inadvertently reference? And is the 20-year trend cycle bound to take us back to 2005 YouTube?

MUSIC

The Biggest Scam in the Music Industry by mattyballz (18:38)

In today’s music industry, which relies heavily on streaming performance, some artists and record labels are getting pretty creative when it comes to artificially boosting their numbers. In this video, mattyballz takes a closer look at a practice that J. Cole once famously called fellow artists out on: buying and faking streams. Why were thousands of Spotify accounts hacked just to play a French Montana song over and over again? Sure, indie artists can benefit from inflating their streaming numbers, but what’s in it for the record labels that engage in the practice? And are bundled album sales contributing to the problem?