The You Tube videos that shaped pop culture as we know it. No longer exclusively the virtual home to cute dogs and Nyan cats, You Tube has become its own ecosystem, with 500 hours of footage uploaded to the site every minute, with its biggest stars earning upwards of $50 million every year. Through the grainy lens of a webcam (the chunky kind that would sit clumsily atop your Dell desktop), Bree would pour her thoughts - her boring town, being homeschooled, her best friend Daniel - to a ballooning viewership that grew increasingly fascinated by her life.
This method of talent-scouting was also employed by dutch singer Esmee Denters in the late 2000s, who went from innocuously covering Justin Timberlake and Natasha Bedingfield on You Tube to becoming one of the first musicians to exceed….