Creatives Steal (Get Over It)

If you go on YouTube, you'll be amazed how many different channels are copying the same frameworks. For example, every genre and topic seems to have its own versions of "reaction videos," where people film themselves watching something else for the first time ( this video of two kids hearing Phil Collins "In The Air Tonight gets me every time". It's almost lazy, in that this style of video is really not creating anything at all, but I think it proves the point well. Just be being you, by bringing your unique perspective to something someone else created, you can bring new value into this world. Your take on something will always be different than someone else's. In a reaction video, you're simply just being you — and filming it for the world — and the format routinely picks up more views than almost any other on the internet. The same goes for cover songs. Playing someone else's song will undoubtedly sound different and bring a new perspective coming from you, because you're the one playing it. While I'm not condoning purposefully taking other people's work and passing it off as your own, I am saying that new work is always built off of others. So don't be so afraid to be inspired by other works, to take your favorite bits and iterate on them. How do you think the blues became Rock & Roll? It is helpful to try not to hone in on one inspiration point — try to have many. But in the in end, creatives are just building off of each other. No one really owns anything when it comes down to it, which makes it that much easier to understand that someone will borrow from you, too. I found this notion to be very freeing in that I didn't feel so much pressure to have to come up with something no one had ever seen before every time I make something new. Just by being me, and making something from my point of view, it's going to have a unique spin.