4 way you can use YouTube to support your music career
With its massive user base and ease of accessibility, YouTube is a huge asset in supporting an artists career. So how can you make the platform work best for you? Here we look at four key techniques.
Guest post by Randi Zimmerman of the Symphonic Blog
It’s no secret that YouTube is a huge platform with major potential for artists. Whether you post behind the scenes content or show off your latest music videos, content on the platform can reach a huge audience, help you grow your fanbase, sell more tickets, and so much more. Looking for some inspiration? Here are 4 ways to support your music career with YouTube…
4 Ways To Support Your Music Career with YouTube
With approximately 1.86 BILLION users worldwide, YouTube is a huge player for artists looking to share their stuff with the world… What’re you waiting for? Click To Tweet
Plan & Promote Your Next Tour
YouTube offers detailed analytics to help you decide where to go on tour, what music to play, and how to promote it before the big day(s). For example, the music charts & insights tool lets you see what fans are listening to city-by-city. Data like this shows where your music is being discovered locally and globally, so you can make informed decisions on the content of your tour.
Before then, YouTube is a great place to promote your tour and sell more tickets. There are tons of ways to do this. For example, you can (and should):
- Update your channel’s banner and description to keep fans excited about what you’re up to.
- Hype up your fans by giving them a preview of what’s to come.
- Use Cards (YouTube’s versatile pop-up screen feature) to sell tickets, merch, link to pre-release songs and other videos. — You can enable cards to push to approved ticket distributors, websites, and merchandise sites.
- Schedule a Premiere and encourage fans to tune in.
- Upload art tracks and make lyric videos.
Connect With Your Fans
If you’re interested in long-term growth (which you should be!), engaging with your fans and building a community that loves and shares your content should be a huge priority. On YouTube, you can create deeper connections with your fans by having two-way conversations on your channel and interacting as much as possible.
You should be doing things like pinning comments that start meaningful conversations to the top of the comment section, liking and disliking comments, replying as much as you can, and sharing fan-uploaded content.
All these things seem small, but they show your fans that you care about what they have to say and take the time to show them that.
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Monetize Your YouTube Channel
The first step to monetizing your channel is to join the YouTube Partner Program. With it, you can earn money by using ads to generate revenue. While you focus on making music, YouTube matches ads with your channel and the fans who watch your videos. Then, they collect money from the advertisers and send payments to your AdSense account.
You can actually do this through Symphonic, too. We have a dedicated staff that will scan each and every song in your catalog to ensure that we either monetize or takedown videos uploaded by third party individuals. With YouTube’s Content ID system, we’ll ensure nobody else is using your content other than you, and nobody is earning money off of YOUR hard work.
- We wrote a whole article breaking this down for you to make it easy. // Check out, “How Does YouTube Monetization Work?” to learn everything you need to know about getting started.
Upgrade To An Official Artist Channel
Official Artist Channels are a channel layout that gives you more control over what your fans see first. Some of the major benefits include:
- All your music can be found in one place.
- You can customize the top playlist and trailer.
- Auto-generated playlists appear with your ‘official music’ and full album discography.
- Fans will have a single place to subscribe.
Subscribers from related channels (Topic channel, Partner-provided channel, etc.) will be automatically merged onto your Official Artist Channel — giving you one streamlined place to interact with them, rather than managing multiple channels and comment streams.
Currently, Official Artist Channels are available to channels that meet the following criteria:
- Channels owned and operated by Artists, managers, or your label. An ‘owned and operated’ channel is considered a channel managed by you or your team.
- You have at least 3 official music videos on YouTube delivered from a music distribution partner.
Step up your game and get more out of your YouTube presence. Utilizing everything the platform has to offer can bring you major growth, whether than be more streams and ticket sales to accessing more fans all around the world.
Don’t sleep on the power of YouTube! If you’re ready to build your career and reach new heights, YouTube can get you there.
Good luck!
