A Song on YouTube

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It was a classmate who first told Rebecca Black about a company called Arc Music Factory. For a fee of $4,000, you could have a song recorded, complete with music video. The company even provided the music and lyrics. For Rebecca, who was a 13-year-old student with a passion for music and drama, it seemed like a fantastic opportunity. Her mother agreed to pay the $4,000 and Rebecca recorded a song called Friday.

As soon as the music video was ready, Rebecca uploaded it to YouTube. In the first month, a few hundred people watched it. But nothing could prepare her for what would happen next. Thanks to a few mentions on the social networking service Twitter, the video went viral. Within three months, more than 167 million people had viewed the video.

And more than 3 million of those viewers clicked dislike, the most negative reaction a video on YouTube had ever received. The record was previously held by Justin Bieber’s song, Baby. Rebecca Black’s single was suddenly famous all around the world for being the worst song in the world ever. Black told the Daily Beast website that the negative attention the song received shocked and hurt her. She appeared on The Tonight Show on American TV and reiterated the idea, saying she cried when she first read the negative comments on her video.

So was it a mistake to put it on YouTube? Were it so easy for people to make unkind comments, sometimes just for fun? The song was removed in June, four months after first being posted, partly because of all the negative publicity it was creating. After all, Rebecca was still just a young teenager about to turn 14. How could she cope with negative feedback from 3 million people?

But there’s an old saying in show business that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Suddenly Rebecca Black was famous. And people at the top of the music business wanted to meet her. Simon Cowell, music boss and inventor of The X Factor and other talent shows, said, "...whatever she’s done has worked. Whether you like her or not, she’s the most talked-about artist in America right now.

She put the video of Friday back on YouTube, and the song entered the music charts in six different countries. Since then, she has formed her own record company, released an album, appeared in one of Katy Perry’s music videos and travelled to Australia to promote a mobile phone network. Some people think it was a mistake for Rebecca to put Friday on YouTube because it received such negative and hurtful comments, but in reality, that mistake has given her a chance of success. Whether she makes the most of it or not is up to her."