David Pierce, writing for Protocol:
One easy knock on music-streaming services is that they’re all the same. Their libraries may differ slightly at the margins, but they all have about the same 60 million or so songs in their catalog. And Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” sounds pretty much the same anywhere you play it.
Except on YouTube. There you can watch the original version, but also the Carpool Karaoke version, a duet Carey did with Justin Bieber, the scene from “Love Actually” that features the song, and countless live performances, covers and remixes. Want to learn a dance to the song in time for this year’s holidays? Want to learn to play the song on the guitar or piano? Want to hear a smash-cut version of President Trump singing the song? Want to know how that song got to be so irritatingly ubiquitous? That’s all on the first page of the YouTube search results. YouTube has a corpus of unique music content that none of its rivals can touch.