YouTube’s Top Channels Mostly Feature Music
By Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.
Last week, I ran into Billboard senior branding correspondent Andrew Hampp at the Digital Media Wire Music awards dinner (I was on a panel there), who dropped some interesting news: Billboard was announcing that night that it had begun integrating YouTube into its charts, which instantly put the “Harlem Shake” song atop the charts.
So not only do the kids consider YouTube the best unlimited music service in the world, but now, the most traditionally authoritative music sales chart is counting YouTube views. As if we needed any more evidence of how important music is to YouTube, check out this list of its most popular partners, from the latest ComScore report. We’ve color-coded it as follows:
- Green: purely music
- Blue: partially music
- Red: not music
| Top YouTube Partner Channels* Ranked by Unique Video Viewers January 2013 Total U.S. – Home and Work Locations Content Videos Only (Ad Videos Not Included) Source: comScore Video Metrix | |||
| Property | Total Unique Viewers (000) | Videos (000) | Minutes per Viewer |
| VEVO @ YouTube | 48,875 | 552,443 | 37.6 |
| Fullscreen @ YouTube | 35,409 | 242,739 | 20.5 |
| Maker Studios Inc. @ YouTube | 34,760 | 446,899 | 46.2 |
| Warner Music @ Youtube | 25,949 | 144,377 | 18.7 |
| ZEFR @ YouTube | 25,615 | 112,028 | 12.0 |
| Machinima @ YouTube | 24,322 | 473,355 | 66.4 |
| BroadbandTV @ YouTube | 15,523 | 98,394 | 19.0 |
| UMG @ YouTube | 14,655 | 38,955 | 7.5 |
| The Orchard @ YouTube | 13,636 | 41,410 | 8.0 |
| rumblefish @ YouTube | 10,878 | 20,716 | 4.5 |
*YouTube Partner Reporting, starting with January 2013 data, gives credit to YouTube Partners for views of their single-claimed user-generated content.
As one might expect, given that YouTube is for videos, some of these partners are closely aligned with the film, television, and videogame worlds. But what’s really striking is how many of them are either totally (5 out of 10) or partially (3 out of 10) about playing music. In other words, well over half of the top partner videos on YouTube are songs.
You failed to mention the most important fact – For the most part the YouTube music channels are not paying rights holders! The fact that Billboard is integrating data relating to illegal distribution of creative works into their charts makes their charts useless to me as a music industry professional.