Of course your band’s website is not youtube! So you might ask what youtube has to do with my series about the perfect band website. If you are a musician and you want to survive on the Internet you have to have a music video running on youtube. As with all the other online products the online world is very different from the offline world. If you have an open mind you will discover once more that there is a huge amount of potential in the online world.
What do you need for an youtube video
- a song
- a camera team (and an idea for the video)
- someone to cut the video
Well these things where already mandetory in an offline world so I won’t discuss them any further.
What is important while uploading the video?
First of all it is important to understand how your video will spread through the Internet
- On webzines if you contact them an tell them about your video
- It will pass on from person to person once they find, watch and like it
- It appears as a similar video besides other videos
- Via search functions (be it google search or the video search of youtube)
The first two points are mainly your responsability. Once your video is great and you contact a lot of magzines and give them a press release the video might appear on a lot of websites. If your song and video are really great people might spread the word. But be warned everyone is talking about becoming viral. If all the music videos out there became viral everyone would be constantly watching music videos. So don’t forget that becoming viral hardly ever happens.
The 3rd and 4th point are your responsability. To some degree youself can decide where your video is supposed to appear. Search and recommendation engines are responsible to battle with these two points. But machines can undersand text documents like websites much better in comparison to rich media content like your video. That is why the algorithms on these machines probably pay a lot of attention to the tags you use while tagging the video, the title you put in and the description text. Of course they will probably also look at the websites on which the video is embedded and analyse what users this video watched an which other videos these users watched.
Anyway: your video should have the following title: “Bandname – Songname on Recordname” because this is what people are most likely to search for.
A short discussion on cover songs and guest musicians
Doing coversongs is by the way a great method to gain publicity. Look at the Van Canto videos. They have covered many bands and have those names in their title. If you search for “wishmaster” in youtube you easily find the van canto cover of wishmaster! Imagine how often people search for music by a famous musician in comparison to your music!
I did the work for you and just looked it up for Wishmaster and Van Canto:
On last.fm 317.207 people listen to the record wishmaster by Nightwish. On the other hand only 49.164 people listen to Van Canto! So you can do the math and decide what kind of songs you want to upload for promo reasons.
here you go with a title for a song with a guest musician: “your band’s name – songname feat. musician’s name from his band’s name”
illegal content on your videos
Most songs are on youtube in some form. Be happy about the fact that people like your music! A lot of artists wish they had so much attention. My article Why open source is the way to go holds perfectly as my contribution on copy rights in music anyway – also compare my article on sharing music. So what can you do to profit from the fact that most songs are on youtube anyway?
Upload them yourself. Use good tags, nice pictures, and provide the lyrics. Promote them! Put them on your search engine optimizied pages and ask people to connect with you and buy the album or donate for your music.
THINK ABOUT IT!
If you are Lady Gaga and your videos are being watched million times and some one else put them on youtube you don’t have as much benefit as they are watched on YOUR youtube channel. Where people could become subscribers or where you are able to embed AND change messages for your tour / album within the videos.!
So do you really want to be angry if someone else puts your videos on youtube. A very nice example is Blind Guardian. About one year ago they uploaded all their videos to their youtube channel. But the videos where already out there and other videos already made rank1 in search for videos. Again algorithms are just not that smart and the user doesn’t care as long as he sees the video!
new forms of marketing
This is the best part of the message. have a look at this great video (thogh it has nothing to do with music!) and realize that you have to act differently on the internet.
Understand?
Well here is a list of things you can do to be interesting and attract people on youtube if you are a musician:
- Fans love interviews: make a video interviews. Have your fans ask you questions and answer them in a video
- medleys (album introduction)
- have a prelistening session of your album. You can tune into every song and discuss the song. What do you need print media or similar for? You can reach your audiance in a much more interesting way
- live videos: Ask your fans to tape your show. You will easily get a 20 + cam mix of a song. This will create much more feeling and will be much cheaper than any professional music video
- Record short stories,
- Interact with the world. Remember what old spice – even though not a band – did? If not have a look at my upcoming blog article on old spice.
- Make competitions: Ask your fans to create funny videos using your songs. Don’t be afraid that the quallity might be bad. (if the quality is bad it won’t spread on the web)
Be creative be fun and especially forget about the old business models! On the internet you want to be open!