<p>Interesting, @halflokum - in your D’s case I’m sure they were an asset for those who looked for them!</p>
<p>@actor12 - D has also been asked recently for YouTube links by Regional Theatres. I’m curious - who advised you to hide or remove YouTube videos and Facebook prior to college auditions? Was it an audition coach, and if so was it a general suggestion or specific to certain videos? Did that apply to ALL of your videos, or just those that might be embarrassing?</p>
<p>No…I don’t have anything embarrassing. I think the coach feels that it’s better to be judged on the material we have prepared rather than past performances. And yes, all of them. It’s not like some were bad or anything. Actually, I can see it maybe helping if you have a bad audition and they find a good video on YouTube, if they’re looking.</p>
<p>My daughter hides almost everything and before college auditions there was big clean-up. She didn’t have a coach so I think she probably read it somewhere. There are a couple of exceptions, one where she won an award and one from a particularly good show but I think at this point she feels that she’s always growing and doesn’t want to be judged on something even from 6 months ago.</p>
<p>One college required an uploaded video to Youtube, and provided instructions on how to do it as an unlisted video. Michigan required an upload to their private site. My D has recently been asked by a regional theatre to provide a youtube video for a possible role they are considering her for. So I believe that this will become more common.
My son did have one of his vocal performances removed from youtube. But he contacted the copyright company and received permission and then they allowed the posting. If you do post your performances, it is a good idea to review them fairly often and remove those that are dated or that do not show you in a good light.
I also wondered if any of the colleges explored youtube sites of the applicants that they were seriously considering and whether or not it made a difference…</p>
<p>^^^ I guess we’ll never know. My feeling was that as long as whatever you post is actually good (and you need to be a fair judge of that), there was no downside to having it there. If the colleges chose to look for it, it should only serve to strengthen the positive things that already made them be interested enough in the first place to spend the time looking for it. If they never looked, nothing lost.</p>
<p>On a preliminary tour during junior year, my boys were surprised at a VERY LARGE UNIVERSITY in SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA when the admissions rep in the School of Theatre said, “oh, I saw your YouTube videos.” Thankfully nothing embarrassing – but served as a cautionary tale as we moved forward through the process to keep the online presence neat and tidy. And yes, they both were accepted there. ;)</p>
<p>@MTTwinsinCA - Hoorah… your admissions-related YouTube story (cc’s first documented case as far as I remember) is so interesting!! </p>
<p>I’m unsurprised, as D has met lots of people who say they’ve stalked her on YouTube, and she’s certainly done the same with others. Heck, even I love to peruse various MT performances and I don’t have a professional interest, so I can imagine that those who do take full advantage of the resource to scout for young talent.</p>
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<p>@halflokum - If I’ve learned nothing else from American Idol, I’ve definitely learned that we parents can be the WORST judge of our kids’ talent. ;-D I sometimes think that open comments on YouTube can provide young performers (AND their parents) with needed unbiased feedback… at least I think that when the comments aren’t TOO brutal.</p>
<p>^^^@momcares – I’m certainly inclined to agree with you but I think the bigger risk is thinking our kid(s) is talented in the first place and discovering the hard way that woops, I guess they actually are not competitve. Posting a YouTube video won’t change that reality but it might invite some tough to read commentary. College admissions reps won’t go looking for kids that they don’t feel are talented in the audition room (assuming they even do at all which we don’t know for sure but very interesting example MTTwinsinCA).</p>
<p>My feeling is as long as whatever you post is a fair representation of their work, I don’t think there is any admissions-related risk and possibly a benefit if an audition left admissions curious but not convinced. On the off chance that is how it worked, I stuck a few clips on YouTube to be found. Likely it was never looked at but it was easy enough to do.</p>
<p>Interesting story on Huffington Post.</p>
<p>Is YouTube the New Tin Pan Alley?</p>
<p>… snip</p>
<p>So where do people hungry for the newest songs of the musical theater go now? Where is the next George Gershwin cutting his ivory teeth? As a musical theater writer and fan, I’ve spent the last decade looking to Broadway for inspiration from the next generation of writers. But more and more I’ve found that some of the most exciting new musical theater writers are not debuting on Broadway, but on YouTube. I started to wonder: Has a new digital Tin Pan Alley begun to emerge, and what does it mean for the future of musical theater and Broadway? </p>
<p>… cont’d</p>
<p>[Ryan</a> Cunningham: Is YouTube the New Tin Pan Alley?](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>Is YouTube the New Tin Pan Alley? | HuffPost Entertainment)</p>
<p>^^I came across that article yesterday too and had sent it to my MT daughter. 
She found it interesting. I do think that today having a presence on the internet for someone in this field is beneficial. But make sure you only have positive stuff online! 
YouTube was not around when my kid was in high school and so no videos of her in shows are online from before the college years. The college and professional theater productions typically have not allowed video but she has a lot of other videos as a professional online now (ex., she is a singer/songwriter performing regularly in NYC and sometimes elsewhere). I have seen many examples first hand through her and other friends where people in the industry have learned of them through such samples online. Also, the article talks about the exposure for composers and songwriters (she does that too) and I think again, the online presence has had an impact on the career.</p>
<p>Not sure where to put this, but since it is on YouTube, and deals with intellectual property this may be an ok place… </p>
<p>Lots of great MT composers participated in this cute YouTube reminder (with puppets!) that you should always buy sheet music for the songs you sing…</p>
<p>[“Someone</a> Wrote That Song” - music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Craig Carnelia - YouTube](<a href=“"Someone Wrote That Song" - music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Craig Carnelia - YouTube”>"Someone Wrote That Song" - music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Craig Carnelia - YouTube)</p>
<p>This also reminded me of a question. </p>
<p>Does anyone know how to add a link to the place others can buy sheet music for a song you post a version of on YouTube?</p>
<p>I am friends with a professor of theatre from a top university and he said they do use YouTube in fact one year when they taped auditions at unifieds when they got back to campus nothing was filmed so they went to YouTube and actually picked part of there class from there</p>
<p>@momcares: you can add a link to a youtube video as an “annotation” (there are several choices, bubbles, notes, etc.). Youtube Help has a very detailed explanation of how to do this, you add can annotations anywhere in your video (beginning, end, top, bottom, etc.) with their slick annotation editor. The link to the youtube help page on annotations is:</p>
<p>[Getting</a> started with Annotations - YouTube Help](<a href=“http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&topic=14354&answer=92710]Getting”>Edit videos & video settings - YouTube Help)</p>
<p>Or google “youtube help annotation”</p>
<p>
Interesting look at YouTube from some composers’ perspective in this article. <a href=“http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/issue/featuredstory.cfm?story=3&indexID=45”>http://www.tcg.org/publications/at/issue/featuredstory.cfm?story=3&indexID=45</a></p>
<p>Wow, look at how far video requests from schools have come in just three years! YouTube has changed everything and made the casting world a much smaller place. My D has done video auditions for movies and web series that film all over the country. Video submissions are quickly becoming an industry standard, at least for the first round of auditions. I think if they like what they see it is highly beneficial to have other YouTube clips for them to find.</p>
<p>Camps are asking kids not to send in audition DVDs any longer, but just to send in a YouTube clip. Much easier to keep track of and store, plus no compatibility issues on playback. I agree that having “good stuff” to be found is a good idea.</p>
<p>I agree that much seems to have changed wrt YouTube in the past few years… including unwelcome changes to the comment system. I wonder if any MT program heads have revised their opinions on YouTube as they’ve watched some of their students use it to great career advantage?</p>