Yo, homeboys and homegirls! Put down those pogs and let us rap at you for a minute. You kids are totally down with the sickness, right? Let’s all agree that we’re straight-up caught in a bad romance—a romance with not knowing who the 2015 YouTube music award winners are! Fist bump with Red Bulls! Let’s “break our rusty cage and run,” as we stay on top of the freshest and hottest beats—though not this sick beat, kids, because that would violate copyright law—and learn who won this year’s YouTube Music Awards, a list that includes Tay-Tay, Beyoncé, and Lady Gaga. Gnarly! Surge Cola!
The absolute coolest part, of course, is that you kids didn’t have to do any voting at all! Voting is for squares, right?!? Except of course that you should for sure Rock The Vote because you guys are the future and please get your flu shots. But YouTube did all the work for you, as the YouTube Music Award winners were selected “based on growth in views, subscribers and engagement over the last six months on YouTube.” Rad! This way, the market can go ahead and reward the most commercially successful acts, combined with the artists most “engaged with” online, through some massively complicated data mining that is probably just like a sweet Minecraft operation. That’s what you call them, right? Operations? Jiggy-fresh!
Now that awards can have all the boring, subjective human parts taken out, we can give trophies to the real winners: mainstream acts like Ariana Grande, Hozier, One Direction, and Taylor Swift. Also recognized are YouTube-originated stars like Pentatonix and Lindsey Stirling. Plus, making the whole thing even cooler is the fact that, unlike in years past, there’s no lame awards show you to have to watch. Instead, there will merely be a one-day infusion of music content on the site, featuring new videos created by Vice Media for artists including Cahoots, Charli XCX, Ed Sheeran, Martin Garrix, Max Schneider, Migos, Megan Nicole, Nicky Jam and Shamir. You kids like all of them, right? Totes. You totes like all of them.
If you want to watch a video that’s almost a minute long—we know, why not just write a whole book about it, jeez—showing all of the 50 winners for about a half-second each, it’s below. Hopefully that will answer any lingering questions you may have, like what exactly the purpose of this is, other than to tell you what you already like and then celebrate the technology that allows Google (proud owners of YouTube) to remind you what you like. Turtle power!