Pirate radio stations explode on YouTube

Luke Pritchard and Jonny Laxton were 13 when they met at a boarding school in Crowthorne, England, in 2011. They bonded over a shared love of underground music and in 2014 started a YouTube channel, College Music, to promote the artists they liked.
 
At first, the channel grew slowly. Then, in the spring of 2016, Pritchard discovered 24/7 live-streaming, a feature that allows YouTube’s users to broadcast a single video continuously.
 
College Music had 794 subscribers in April 2015, a year before  Pritchard and Laxton started streaming. A month after they began, they had more than 18,440. In April 2016, they had 98,110 and as of last month, with three active live streams, they have more than triple that amount, with 334,000. They make about $5,000 a month from the streams.

 

The boys stumbled upon a new strategy, one that, in the past two years, has helped a certain kind of YouTube channel achieve widespread popularity. Hundreds of independently run channels have begun to stream music nonstop, with videos that combine playlists with hundreds of songs and short, looped animations, often taken from anime films without copyright permission.
 
Live streams come in many different genres. Two of College Music’s streams are part of a family of channels that broadcast what the broadcasters call lofi (low-fidelity) hip-hop, mellow music that would sound familiar to fans of J Dilla and Nujabes. Such videos, with subscriber counts in the hundreds of thousands, are some of most popular continuously streaming music stations on the site. Many are run by young Europeans, who may have only a passing familiarity with the history of the music they are spreading.

 
And they don’t know why, but their users really do insist on the anime images.Laxton said fans protested when the imagery of the video was changed, and provided a screenshot of a particularly upset user requesting that an anime clip be restored to one of its three stations.