The first of two volumes on YouTube and music focuses on how sonic cyberculture has become embedded within everyday life. As the main platform for video sharing since its launch back in 2005, YouTube has amassed unquantifiable amounts of audiovisual content that have been produced, shared, transformed, downloaded and consumed by billions of users worldwide, making YouTube as a central hub for contemporary media. As an online space that provides new formats for content production and sharing, the platform operates as a portal into the social, political and cultural spectra of everyday life, creating new work logics and forms of labour (from DIY to self-made YouTube celebrities), creative communities and social bubbles in cyberspace. Music and sound have played a vital role within this emergent and democratised space. In this volume, 13 authors from several different countries examine how music has been created and used by YouTube users to establish and a promote a narrative for their daily lives. The digital platform has been used to create and disseminate sonic and emotional soundscapes, to stage performances and build artistic (cyber)identity, to engage in producing and circulating aural content for composing and teaching, and even to customize listening habits. This volume mixes long and short essays to explore these interactions from a variety of angles, from YouTube users’ comments to online collaborations between composers and listeners and virtual stages for real and imagined performances.

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Sleeping is a basic need, but all persons have their own unique way of doing it. Some people need total silence, whereas others need the presence of specifi c sounds to fall asleep and enjoy a restful night. On YouTube, users share playlists and original compositions to promote sleepiness and relaxation and help people to get a good night’s sleep. Some of this content is also intended to help people study, work, or read, as indicated by the titles, descriptions, and tags that accompany the compositions. In this article, I examine YouTube as a source of sound, music, and other audiovisual content that aims to help people fall asleep. I also analyze the role of this type of content in the construction of listening spaces suitable for the activity of sleeping and look at why the same kind of compositions and genres of music are likewise recommended for other activities such as reading, working, or studying. The main argument is that this kind of content is the result of shared and distributed subjectivities constructed from the relationship between users, content, and producers. The alleged effectiveness of this kind of content comes from these subjectivities and from the audio characteristics that enable these videos to mask other sounds. For this reason, they can be considered to be orphic media with the capacity to build listening spaces that can function as sound asylums.