Online video hosting site YouTube have announced plans for their first ever awards, celebrating the people and videos that make the site so popular and dominant in today's web world.Lady Gaga, Arcade Fire and Eminem will perform as part of the inaugural YouTube Music Awards on November 3, celebrating the rise of the Google-owned video service to what it calls "the world's go-to music destination."Jason Schwartzman will host the live-streamed awards, which YouTube says will include "performances and musical collaborations from Seoul, Moscow, London and Rio," followed by a live event in New York.
Nominees will be announced on October 17, based on videos that have been watched and shared the most over the past year. It appears that winners will be chosen by the public through social media.It's been a big year for YouTube: In addition to racking up billions and billions of views (including 1.7 billion alone for Psy's "Gangnam Style" and hundreds of millions more for recent videos from stars including Justin Bieber, Katy Perry and Miley Cyrus), Billboard in February altered its chart criteria to include data from YouTube.
A similar awards was held by YouTube in 2006 and 2007 but came under fire for creating too much of a formalised process for the freeform, casual nature of YouTube videos. Categories then included Adorable, Comedy, Commentary, Creative, Inspirational, Musician of the Year and Series in 2006 and in 2007 an additional Eyewitness, Instructional, Short Film, Sports and Political Comedy set of categories was included.