Transmitter YouTube Channel Launching To Promote British Musicians
On Friday UK music trade group BPI, which represents record labels, and LoveLive, a company that specializes in music content and live video, announced a partnership to launch a new YouTube music channel on November 11th. Called Transmitter, the new channel is intended to promote UK musicians with exclusive programming and live streamed shows including content curated by the artists.
Transmitter won't officially launch till November 11th but the channel's up now and you can check out a couple of videos and subscribe if you wish.
Transmitter Teaser Trailer
The collaborative effort brings together partners with the full range of skills and abilities needed to create a YouTube channel that includes musicians from a broad range of record labels.
BPI "represents the UK’s recorded music industry" including "more than 300 independent music companies and the UK’s major record companies – Universal Music, Sony Music, and Warner Music." While likely no easy task, that does put BPI in the position of potentially neutral ground when developing Transmitter.
In fact, according to BPI's chief executive Geoff Taylor:
"We're doing it because all labels think it's something that can add to what's out there, and the BPI is a convenient place for labels to do something together…The BPI does a lot of things to protect the market, but we want to promote the market as well as protecting it. We've embedded click-to-buy in the videos in quite an interesting way, so it's very much about helping the legal music market to grow."
BPI turned to LoveLive, whose experience working with numerous labels, artists and brands, likely came in handy. But LoveLive also brings the experience of launching their own LoveLive TV channel on YouTube and successfully growing it to over 146,000 subscribers.
Friday's announcement, in addition to being a great initiative by an industry trade group, is a reminder of the strength of music channels on YouTube especially given YouTube's popularity for listening to music:
"YouTube recently beat Google and Facebook to become the top youth brand voted for by 16-24 year olds in the UK. It was also reported recently that 77% of 16-24 year olds now listen to music on YouTube compared to 33% via streaming services such as Spotify and even 74% via their own personalised mp3 player."
Stuart Dredge notes a number of shows and organizations with channels aggregating music videos and related programming including SB.TV, UKF and MÜ-YAP.
Hypebot Senior Contributor Clyde Smith (@fluxresearch/@crowdfundingm) also blogs at Flux Research and Crowdfunding For Musicians. To suggest topics for Hypebot, contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.
