The events of the past few days have sparked a conversation about consent, healthy fan-creator relationships, and online safety in the YouTube community. Online microcelebrity is hard to monitor: it involves relatively tight-knit and virtual communities that connect individuals to one another with very little outside intervention. YouTube is an intimate, informal format that fosters close personal relationships between creator and fan. This can be a good thing, as exemplified by the online charity collaboration Project for Awesome. But it may also make for an abusive atmosphere.
Excising offenders from the business is a good first step, but this conversation is much bigger than a small independent music label. After all, YouTube stardom is a strange beast. Combining the enthusiasm of traditional celebrity with the interpersonal accessibility of the Internet is a powerful, but dangerous, combination. How DFTBA Records, and the community around them, handles this may create a precedent for other online communities to follow.
Catherine L. Addington 