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The 100 Greatest Live Performances on YouTube

We’re coming up on the tenth anniversary of YouTube next February, but really, it feels like the site has been around far longer. In fact, YouTube’s influence has been so pervasive and critical on our everyday lives that it’s pretty close to impossible to remember what life was like before it — probably just an endlessly frustrating series of ineffective on-site streams and 24-hour VH1 Classic marathons, just blindly hoping to catch the video for “Hungry Like the Wolf.”

To commemorate the video-sharing service that changed our lives immeasurably for the better, we’ve collected a list — unranked, in alphabetical order — of our 100 all-time favorite performance clips available on the site. Some are full-set concerts, some are minute-long a capellas, some are done for full crowds in stadiums so massive they’re impossible to capture entirely on camera, and some are done on empty streets for no one in particular. The only thing they all have in common is that they all feature some measure of live performing, and that we can’t imagine a world in which any of them aren’t available for our viewing pleasure with minimal effort at a second’s notice. (And if you’re mad about your favorite artist being left off, trust us, so are we. One hundred isn’t as big a number as you might think.)

Enjoy, and if you’re at work, try not to get to fired for attempting to watch all 100 at once.