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Launched in 2005, YouTube has contributed to redefining the uses and values of music in the general context of its digitization. Considered as a threat to a music industry that is dependent on physical formats and controlling channels of communication, the site has made possible an unprecedented democratization of “content”: instead of an all-encompassing cultural industry, we now have a personalized “service.” Nevertheless, in both its own rhetoric and the way the platform is used, YouTube perpetuates old mass media logics and appears to reconstitute, in its own terms, the pre-existing competitive market. The question thus arises: does YouTube spell the end of the cultural industry, or is it pursuing the old logics in the disguise of “digital disruption”? This article attempts to provide an answer by putting YouTube into perspective with a semiotic analysis and tools derived from critical theory.