What could possibly be more fringe than fringe? What could be more independent than an artist with minimal exposure plugging away with barely a contract in hand? Well, musicians who do most of their performing at home for no one in particular. The Internet has allowed for a curious development in the way people distribute and consume music. The line between live and recorded has blurred, and it's quite possible for an individual to be seen by millions yet never attain any kind of real fame. Granted, the overwhelming majority of videos posted to sites like youtube are just passing detritus, but every now and then a surprisingly talented individual uploads something beautiful.

Take, for instance, this video of a user who goes by the name of tsud123 jamming on his ukulele with a gifted university student from the Netherlands named Yun-Feng Fu. It's an acoustic cover of "Waterfalls" by TLC. At once respectful of the original and fittingly playful, I find myself enjoying this cute rendition a lot more than the slick 90's super-hit that inspired it. Will either of these guys ever be famous in the traditional sense? Probably not, even if they deserve it more than a sizable portion of people who currently have record contracts. What's really wonderful, though, is that this fun cover song is available for anyone to experience for free at any time. Before high-speed Internet, you only got to see stuff like this at the odd open-mic night.

Watching tsud and Yun-Feng do their thing, my mind immediately went to a slightly higher-profile cover of another popular track from several years ago. Independent, Irish whatever-you-wanna-call-them band Elbow played a smirking, ironic cover of a Destiny's Child song for a British Radio 1 program called Live Lounge about a decade ago. The cover saw some roundabout exposure stateside thanks to a video from the early days of distraction-driven websites. Joel Veitch of RatherGood.com put together one of his weird animated videos for the cover. Once again, a ephemeral one-off, in this case a live radio track, gets preserved for what is effectively forever thanks to the gigantic community art project called The Web.

While there's plenty of vanity and absurdity in the youtube, etc. world, it ultimately comes down to the value slightly outweighing the cost, be it of time or other precious resources. It's not just about snarky cover songs or guys goofing around on a webcam. Without these media outlets, I never would have heard "A Bird Came Flying", an original composition by a Dutch harpist named Anne van Schothorst. Is any of this stuff essential pop music? I wouldn't call it that, no. That doesn't mean it isn't a wonderful thing that it exists and can be accessed so easily.

I doubt the Internet will ever function in the same way radio and music video have as a promotional tool for artists. In that sense, sites like youtube work in the exact opposite way entities like MTV always did. In its prime, MTV made stars of unknowns simply by airing their videos. It was a foregone conclusion that artists with videos in regular rotation would sell a huge number of records. Of course, all of those artists already had record contracts, albums and promoters. On youtube, an individual with none of those things gets to have a video and it only gets popular if people like it for some reason. I can't say for certain if anyone has ever gotten a record contract thanks to youtube, but it's only a matter of time before someone does.