Rick Beato is an American YouTube personality, music professional, and educator. Since the early 1980s, he has worked variously as a musician, songwriter, audio engineer and record producer. Beato lives in Georgia, United States. He has written songs with, and produced music for, a variety of musical artists, including Needtobreathe, Parmalee, and Shinedown.
Beato was born into a large family from Rochester, New York. He studied at Ithaca College, obtaining a bachelor of arts degree in music. He earned a master's degree in jazz studies from the New England Conservatory of Music in 1987.
Beato began his YouTube career in 2015 after posting a video of his eldest child, Dylan, who is able to identify individual notes within complex chords after just one hearing.This video of his son's display of perfect pitch received 21 million views, causing Beato to decide to parlay his social media fame into a full-fledged YouTube channel. He posted his first YouTube video on June 8, 2016. On August 27, 2019, Beato received the Golden Play Button from YouTube when he achieved 1 million subscribers. As of August 2021, the YouTube channel has 2.5 million subscribers.
Beato's channel is under his own name, although he introduces every video with the title "Everything Music". One series in the channel is called What Makes This Song Great?, in which Beato deconstructs and discusses the elements of popular songs. The videos in the series regularly get over one million views.
In one video, Beato enlists the help of Bon Jovi guitarist Phil X and virtuoso guitarist Eric Johnson to re-interpret the guitar solo on Led Zeppelin's iconic "Stairway to Heaven". Beato and Phil X play the guitar solo in the styles of Peter Frampton and Eddie Van Halen, respectively, while Johnson plays it in his own style.
Beato has been vocal about what he believes are problems with the enforcement of copyright law, and its application on the YouTube platform. Several of his videos, including those about Radiohead and Fleetwood Mac, were issued take-down notices because of copyright claims.
In July 2020, Beato testified about his experiences on YouTube before a United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary reviewing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act considering limitations and exceptions like fair use.