A string of live shows scheduled to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the music review YouTube channel The Needle Drop have been cancelled. The cancellations come in the wake of a piece at The Fader on creator Anthony Fantano’s lesser-known YouTube channel, thatistheplan, on which he published “dense videos full of references to memes” with titles like “pepe the frog triggers hillary clinton.”
Shows in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston have been cancelled without comment from promoters, but Popgun Presents, who were promoting Fantano’s October 28 show at Murmrr Theatre in Brooklyn, NY, indicated that the cancellation was linked to the fallout from The Fader’s article.
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The Needle Drop is hugely popular, with over 1.1 million subscribers, and is widely credited with pioneering the online video music review. It was Fantano’s other endeavor, thatistheplan, that the Fader piece looked into. With 400,000 followers, The Fader described the channel as “practically unknown outside of [Fantano’s] fanbase, but immensely popular within it.”
According to the article, thatistheplan started as a home for Fantano’s own music but soon took a turn. “His vocabulary took on a screechy, 4Chan-friendly slant,” The Fader wrote. “He raged against SJWs and feminists, and, in video after video, treated black musicians as a punchline.”
Fantano took thatistheplan down soon after The Fader contacted him for comment. He wrote on Twitter that this was due to difficulties monetizing the channels through YouTube.
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Correction: This post originally misidentified the name of Fantano’s other YouTube channel.
