Commercials Invade Music Appreciation Classes!

To people who use YouTube videos to enhance their Music Appreciation classes, WATCH OUT!

I try to make it as easy as possible for students to listen to the music we talk about in class, and, until this semester, I found it easy use YouTube video links to recordings (many that I own) to help my students learn. Obviously our friends at YouTube have figured out that they have a captive and targeted audience in the more serious and studios type of college student, the one that uses the resources his or her teachers point to on line.

This morning I was shocked to find various ads in front of a recording of Perotin (student-targeted ads: Justin Beiber singing "Happy Birthday," an ad for HP computers, and a PSA about not texting and driving). Since this type of thing seriously compromises the "flow" of class, I would suggest to anyone using YouTube in class to play segments of commercial recordings that people have put on YouTube (particularly of the Naxos variety), to load everything ahead of time and screen out (or click out, which you can only do after 5 seconds) the commercials, since the ads start playing right away.