My little brother recently got into a fight with the world-famous electronic musician deadmau5 (pronounced “dead mouse”) in the comment section on a YouTube video. That’s just like little brothers right? Here’s the story. deadmau5 is pretty opinionated when it comes to music, and even has a whole section of his Wikipedia article devoted to disparaging comments he’s made about DJ’s. Basically, his argument is that DJ’s often do little more than get up on stage and hit “play.”
My little brother is a DJ, so needless to say he took offense, and posted a 3-minute rant video directed at Deadmau5 on YouTube. You can watch it yourself, or simply check out their back and forth in the comment section:
That deadmau5 came out to leave a comment is a pretty big deal, but obviously my little brother is still upset. So what’s this fight really about?
Content Creation vs. Curation
Let me define some terms: content creation is when you make an original work. Whether that’s a song, a video, a painting, a blog post, anything that is an original work that you or a team make. Even if you’re not a world famous artist, and even if you don’t have a YouTube channel, you probably still create your own work from time to time. Your tweets, for instance, are your own creations.
But not your retweets. When you share content online, you’re curating it. Finding other great sources of original content online and sharing it. Whether you’re doing it on Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter, today there are tons of great avenues to curate content online and become known for sharing it.