![\"Rick](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1784540352_227_0x0.jpg\")
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YouTube personalitiy Rick Beato speaks on stage on Day 1 of the 2026 NAMM Show at Anaheim Convention Center on January 22, 2026, in Anaheim, California.<\/p>\n
Getty Images<\/p>\n
When Paul McCartney<\/a> went on a publicity blitz a little over a month ago for his new studio album The Boys of Dungeon Lane, his PR team targeted formats and creators like TikTok and the banter-filled YouTube show Chicken Shop Date<\/a>. One creator who didn\u2019t make it on to the schedule: Rick Beato, the musicologist known for his deep-dive interviews with musicians like Brian May and Sting\u2014and whose YouTube channel boasts more than 5 million subscribers.<\/p>\n That omission, which didn\u2019t go unnoticed by some of Beato\u2019s fans, was in spite of the appeal of the host\u2019s formula\u2014which was on full display again over the past week, in the form of an hour-long video interview<\/a> between Beato and Billy Joel that racked up more than 1 million views in just three days. In it, the two men geek out over things like chord progressions, song structure, and the harmonic texture that dissonant notes bring to Joel masterpieces like \u201cAnd So It Goes.\u201d<\/p>\n Many of the viewers who watched it headed straight to Beato\u2019s comments section afterward to call for a McCartney sit-down, prompting Beato to drop a follow-up video<\/a> titled “Why Paul McCartney Won’t Be On My Channel\u201d that reached 1 million views even faster than the Joel interview.<\/p>\n Rick Beato vs. music publicity gatekeepers<\/p>\n In his newest upload, Beato essentially lays out why he believes he\u2019ll never book a McCartney chat. Because, in his telling, the gatekeepers around stars like the former Beatle too often prioritize highly controlled, mainstream publicity loops designed for mass reach rather than the technical breakdowns that Beato\u2019s channel is known for.<\/p>\n Paul McCartney performs live on stage at Paris La Defense Arena during the ‘Got Back!’ Tour on December 04, 2024, in Nanterre, France.<\/p>\n Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cMy channel is actually about music,\u201d Beato says. \u201cThe people that tune in to my channel are interested in music, they\u2019re interested in how people write songs, how people play things.\u201d<\/p>\n He goes on to contrast the deep musical appreciation of his own audience with prestige media brands and Gen-Z viral gimmicks that he sees too many artists chasing\u2014gimmicks, by the way, that have a hard-to-quantify impact on sales but no doubt massage a star\u2019s ego, by putting that star in front of whatever has the attention of the zeitgeist at the moment. <\/p>\n Continues Beato: \u201cThe publicists that work for these people, I guess, don\u2019t consider YouTube to be a legit outlet, even though all of these things end up on YouTube\u2014that’s where everybody watches them.\u201d<\/p>\n He\u2019s right, to a point.<\/p>\n As someone who\u2019s spent more than 20 years as a professional journalist, I not only agree with Beato; it\u2019s clear that this discussion actually transcends the music business, to the point it\u2019s also a modern media story. It\u2019s partly about the chaos of metrics, and an era in which nobody really knows what actually moves the needle anymore.<\/p>\n \u2018Nothing\u2019s really working anymore\u2019<\/p>\n Maybe a piece of content online, for example, didn\u2019t perform well because it wasn\u2019t sufficiently optimized for Google<\/a>. Maybe chatbots like ChatGPT cannibalized<\/a> it, or maybe it was just a subpar piece of content. It could be all of that, or none of it.<\/p>\n I interviewed The Lumineers\u2019 lead singer Wesley Schultz a few years ago, and he made a version of this same point to me. \u201cNothing\u2019s really working anymore, quote-unquote, it\u2019s all just everybody guessing,\u201d he told me. \u201cYou still need good ideas, you need good songs, but we should get creative with how we roll things out.\u201d<\/p>\n When it comes to the Beato video, meanwhile, multiple things are going on here.<\/p>\n Start with the fact that prestige is no longer the guarantee that it once was of a critical mass of eyeballs, in which case a choice has to be made between what amounts to attention or a vanity media placement.<\/p>\n