If you think back to the years between 2012 and 2016, there was a major influx of what are known as music parodies flooding onto YouTube.

This led to the rise of stars such as Bart Baker and most known, Weird Al Yankovich.

But what happened to these stars and where did this culture of making parodies go?

So, the first song parody I ever listened to was one released on the YouTube channel Captain Sparkles.

Okay, I’m a Minecraft fan but that’s not what I’m here to talk about.

This one song is what lead me to look for parodies of other songs from the time and to also eventually find Bark Baker.

Today, I don’t see this side of YouTube anymore though news about Weird Al Yankovic is still being spread.

While there aren’t any concrete known reasons for this once dominant trend to have died, I do have some ideas.

To start, according to copyright law a song can be considered a parody if it makes fun of or criticizes the original song that it parodies.

But, listening to what most people would call a parody, they don’t fit those criteria.

This is where I believe parody songs died.

Around 2016, YouTube made a big push to flag songs that infringed copyright and pushed those videos into the void.

And, as parodies walk a fine line between being infringing and not, they fell into that void.

Now, Yankovic did hold licenses to all the songs he parodied so he was in the clear but because what YouTube did was completely automated, it killed the genre.