They Bought a Bass After Watching: 214 YouTube Comments, With Receipts

By Igor Odaryuk · Published September 3, 2026 · Screenshots taken September 3, 2026 from public comments on youtube.com/@IgorOdaryuk

Why this page exists

I have been playing bass professionally for 25 years and running a YouTube channel since 2010. Today it has about 5,150 subscribers, 508 videos and roughly 1.8 million views. Those are small numbers by YouTube standards. What the numbers do not show is what happens after someone watches a review: they go and buy the bass. I know this because they come back and tell me in the comments, sometimes years later.

When I talk to instrument makers, shops and people who might sponsor the channel, the first question is always some version of “does this actually move product?” Subscriber counts do not answer that. Public comments from real buyers do. So this page is the receipt. It is not a case study with estimated figures, it is a list of people who wrote, unprompted, that they ordered the instrument, that the video convinced them, or that they own the same bass and the review is accurate.

I also built it for students and readers of this site. If you are trying to decide between two instruments, the comments below are as useful as any review, because they come from people who already spent the money and lived with the result.

How I collected this, and how to verify it

The method is simple and you can repeat it. I opened each video, sorted the comments, and took a screenshot of every comment that talked about buying, ordering, deciding on or owning the bass in the video. I did not edit the screenshots, did not crop out negative remarks, and did not ask anyone to write anything. Usernames are shown exactly as YouTube displays them publicly. The timestamps (“5 years ago”, “1 month ago”) are relative to September 3, 2026.

To verify any screenshot: click the source link under it, open the comments on YouTube, and search the page for the username. Some comments are old and sit deep in the thread, so use “Newest first” or “Top comments” as needed. Where a comment was written in Russian, Ukrainian, Spanish, German or Italian I added an English translation in the caption and marked it as a translation.

One more honest note. A comment saying “I just bought one” does not always mean the video caused the purchase. Some people buy first and then look for a demo. So I split the comments into four groups and kept them separate rather than lumping everything into one big number.

The numbers

What I counted	Count
Review videos checked	32
Screenshots on this page	68
Comments transcribed	214
Commenters who bought or ordered the bass	23
Commenters who say the video decided their purchase	6
Commenters planning to buy	15
Owners confirming the review	22
Comments that name the video as the reason in their own words	16
Sales outside the comments, confirmed by me personally	7

Purchases and decisions by brand, counting only the “bought / ordered” and “video decided it” groups:

Brand	From the comments (screenshots below)	Confirmed by me personally (no screenshot)
Yamaha	18	–
Sadowsky	–	4
Squier / Fender	3	–
Cort	3	–
Ibanez	2	–
Rickenbacker	1	–
Gretsch	1	–
Short-scale bass (brand not named in title)	1	–
Zon	–	1
Ken Smith	–	1
Lakland	–	1

Sales outside the comments, on my word

Not every buyer leaves a comment. Some write to me directly, some are people I know. I keep these in a separate column because I cannot link you to a screenshot, and I do not want them mixed into the verifiable numbers. What I can say, and will put my name to:

• Sadowsky: 4 basses. Four friends of mine bought a Sadowsky after watching my NYC 2008 and VTC videos and then talking to me about the instrument in person. I play a Sadowsky myself, and these conversations went from “what is that tone” to a purchase.
• Zon Sonus 5-string: 1. The bass in the 1997 Zon Sonus Custom video sold after the demo.
• Ken Smith 6-string: 1. Sold after my demo.
• Lakland Joe Osborn: 1. The bass from the Lakland Joe Osborn video sold after the review. One commenter under that video wrote “their sales are going up after this”; in this case, literally.

That is 7 instruments, all in the boutique price range, where a single sale matters more to the maker than a dozen budget basses.

Yamaha dominates, and that is not an accident of the channel. The BB and TRBX series sit exactly where most working bassists shop: a serious instrument for a price you can justify. My Yamaha reviews are also the oldest and most watched videos on the channel, so they have had the longest time to collect buyers. Warwick, Cort, Fujigen and the American boutique names follow at smaller volumes, which matches their price points and how many people are in the market for them at any given moment.

Geography, from what commenters mention themselves: the United States, Mexico, Australia, Germany, the United Kingdom, Chile, Uruguay, India, Brazil, Ukraine and Russia. The channel is in English and Russian, and the comments come in both, plus Spanish, German and Italian.

The screenshots, grouped by brand

Each video gets its own block: the video title links to YouTube, and where I wrote a full review on this site, that is linked too. Under each screenshot I quote the key line, mark which of the four groups it belongs to, and link the source.

Yamaha

Warwick

Cort

Fujigen

Sadowsky

Lakland

Rickenbacker

Ibanez

Squier / Fender

Gretsch

Danelectro

Zon

Short-scale bass (brand not named in title)

What this shows, without inflating it

Three things stand out to me after reading all 214 comments in one sitting.

First, demos sell instruments when they are played, not talked about. The most repeated praise across every brand is some version of “finally a demo where he just plays.” Several commenters say outright that they did not understand a word of the Russian-language videos and bought anyway. The playing carried the decision. That matters for anyone thinking about sending me an instrument: what you get is a musician playing your bass in real musical contexts, slap, fingerstyle, pick, slow ballads, fast funk, so a buyer can hear where it sits in a mix.

Second, the effect lasts for years. Comments on the TRBX505 review span from eight years ago to one month ago, and the one-month-old comment is a bassist since 1969 ordering his first five-string. A review published once keeps working as long as the instrument is on sale. That is a very different economics from a paid post that disappears from a feed in a day.

Third, owners police accuracy. Nearly a third of the collected comments are from people who already own the bass. When they say the demo is the best representation of the instrument they have seen, that is a form of quality control I cannot buy. When something is wrong, they say that too, and I leave those comments up.

What this page does not prove: how many people bought without commenting. The comments here are the visible tip. YouTube does not give me purchase data and I am not going to estimate it. If you are a brand and want the analytics side, watch time, audience countries and age groups, I share the real dashboard on request through the contact page.