On 29 Oct., 2013, the latest installment of a video game series was released: Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.

I don't play video games myself. But I know about this because, from that date, i started seeing the interest in chanties spiking on the Internet.

See, in this game, one of the things the player does in various ports is run around "collecting" "sea shanties," "pirate shanties." etc.

I guess it's just some icon that you grab. Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chpH20fDCkQ

But once you do, you can playback the collected chanty during play on the sea (?). Some sound like Joe Blow & his Schmoes jumped into the studio real fast, and other sound like they got Great Big Sea or similar Canadien Voyces.

One thing that makes this all a little more interesting than you might suppose is that the game seems to include quite a large number of chanties (perhaps dozens). Another thing is that these "kids" who play these things, for ours at a time, really get the music drilled into their heads—and then they seek out recordings of the songs.

It looks like many of the chanties are performed straight out of Hugill - that is, unmediated by Folk or Sea Music scene renditions. This means that some of the less-performed (i.e. nowadays) chanties have been selected (i.e. since the creators likely did not have a sense of what all chanties were more/less popular). And that means a certain degree of new canonization (< my nod to another thread - deal with it!) going on.