Maybe I just don’t understand the concept, but at times, I think YouTube is a total waste of storage space and bandwidth. And yet at other times, I’m amazed at what I find on there.

I occasionally get links to musicians and bands where YouTube members post rare video content that I’ve never seen before. Some of this footage is amazing. I just saw a neat capture from a TV program where the Brazilian organist Walter Wanderley performed “Call Me” with a drummer. I’ve seen an old movie of Stan Kenton’s band doing “Southern Scandal”, obviously a “short” like a cartoon reel, where the band is wearing loud suits and just hamming it up for the camera. I’ve seen a phenomenal live version of Maynard Ferguson and his band doing a breakneck performance of “Give It One” that makes the original version seem like a funeral dirge. For kicks, I watched a video of the legendary music dealer Val Shively taking someone on a tour of his store in Upper Darby, PA. And what could be more funny than Carol Burnett outtakes, or snippets of the Gong Show?

And yet, the Wanderley video experience today was typical. I went searching for more content. What do I find? One video that was actually just a still picture of a Hammond organ, with “Summer Samba” playing in the background. Even worse, another video where someone videotaped their old stereo playing the Rain Forest LP! This reminds me of other times where I thought I’d stumbled onto a long-lost video performance I’d been looking for, only to find some amateur hack made their own video and stuck it up there. Hey, I don’t mind if it’s some person’s favorite song, but do the rest of the billions of people in this world want to see this video? I doubt it. Outside of a few friends or relatives, who would want to?

My guess is that the garbage ratio is at least 50%, if not 80-90%. Fine if someone wants to wade through all the crap to find the golden nuggets, but I don’t have the time or patience. My bet is that all this will be YouTube’s downfall. They’ll either shut it down, or they’ll require a payment for people to post there. Which might not be a bad thing: it would keep most of the disposable amateur crap off of there. Maybe now that Google has taken it over, it’ll get cleaned up in coming months. One can only hope. I’d visit it more if I didn’t have to wade through five garbage entries to find even one video worth watching.