14 DAY TRIAL // YouTube is a great way of keeping track of the latest creative trends and popular culture in general. For music in particular, the site is pretty much the go-to place for an entire generation, who grew up with YouTube in the same way old-timers grew up with MTV.
No surprise then that any music trend is going to reverberate across the video site.
In recent years, underground and, increasingly, mainstream electronic and club music has been influenced by the dubstep phenomenon.
The heavy hitting beats and powerful bass lines have been animating underground London clubs for the better part of the last decade, but dubstep has exploded around the world in the past couple of years.
Dubstep's characteristic elements have been influencing a lot of music lately and pouring into other electronic music genres and even into mainstream pop.
When Britney Spears does a "dubstep-inspired" track, not a remix mind your, but the first single from her latest album, you know dubstep has arrived. Or perhaps, jumped the shark, as many early fans would tell you.
Yet, interest in dubstep is only growing, if judging from the latest YouTube trends. Searches with the term 'dubstep' in them have been exploding on the video site and have accelerated in recent weeks.
"YouTube data shows that the genre has been picking up broader interest throughout 2011," Kevin Allocca wrote on YouTube's Trends blog.
"What is new is the major growing appetite for dubstep from the dance-music-loving public, and search data indicates the genre becoming more and more mainstream," he said.
"There are over 40,000 'dubstep'-related videos on YouTube -- and nearly 25,000 results for 'dubstep remix.' This was the year that we began to see the 'dubstep remix' become a part of the pop-culture parody arsenal as well," he revealed.