I frequently turn to YouTube to help me learn unfamiliar church music repertoire; even if I already have a recording, it’s often easier to reach for an online performance than trying to locate it on a CD or cassette tape.
It’s quite a hit and miss exercise, however. If I haven’t got the music yet, the best find is one of those videos where the score scrolls past as the music plays. Failing that, a well-made recording of a quality performance can be very useful. While these may be available for some really obscure pieces, there are other standard repertoire ones which aren’t represented on YouTube at all.
Then again, some YouTube videos can be less than helpful. There’s no shortage of badly recorded, out of tune performances which I will not make it to the end of. My personal nadir was the clip of a jokey encore piece I sang recently. The only performance on YouTube was a rather heavy-handed one by a German choir, in a mixture of German and strongly accented English, which bore out all the stereotypes of Germans not understanding our humour.