Inside Youtube’s Artist Analytics Tool With Music In Mind

YouTube’s incredible reach makes it a must for artists looking to expand the community and fanbase. Recognizing this, the popular video-sharing platform recently rolled out a new Artist Analytics tool, designed to help musicians better track their performance.

Guest post by Stephanie Kurse of The Orchard’s The Daily Rind

With its global audience and billion-plus reach, there’s no question as to why YouTube is the spot for artists to grow their fanbase and community. Exposing your music and brand to that breadth of an audience can help diffuse your art to cities, countries, and people beyond your expectations.

Because music is such an integral part of the platform, YouTube wants “to help artists understand how their music is being consumed across that audience” and has now completely and officially rolled out an analytics feature (separate and in addition to the already detailed channel Analytics) entitled “Artist Analytics.” This is YouTube’s next step in forging a stronger relationship among artists on their platform after the release of YouTube for Artists in 2018. 

Getting Started

If you’re an artist with an Official Artist Channel on YouTube, you’ll be able to view Artist Analytics in the YouTube Studio App on mobile (with easy on-the-go, simplified data), as well as the new (detailed and more comprehensive) data dashboard on the desktop Creator Studio. In the mobile app, Artist Analytics is a separate section from the main channel Analytics, while on the desktop Creator Studio, you’re able to toggle on and off between Artist Analytics (the aggregated view) and the channel Analytics (what you’re used to seeing). 

So, what does this new feature offer? 

Unlike solely channel Analytics, Artist Analytics aggregates the views of an artist’s uploads and those uploaded by fans (User-Generated Content or UGC) that feature their songs recognized by Content ID. YouTube refers to this as Total Reach. This means that you’re able to digest data from every place your music lives— whether on your channel, a Vevo channel, a fan’s reaction video, a topic channel, a choreography video, and so forth. With this new tool, you’ll be able to: 

• Understand where and how fans are discovering your music, including what percentage is from your channel and from UGC. You’ll be able to see top cities, countries, and regions, and maybe find a new area of the world where you have a surprisingly large following. You’ll also be able to drill in to traffic sources to identify where fans are discovering your music by song (including the top videos from user-generated content where your song is being claimed), rather than just the videos that live natively on your channel. 
• See the aggregated and realtime views, engagement, discovery, and geographic data across all of your artist channels and UGC. This can help you learn more about your music across the whole platform, rather than just the videos that live on your channel and can be useful as actionable data points. This can help you make content decisions, find the next channel to partner with, and see what performs best to make a strategic plan for your channel and goals.

YouTube will continue to launch new features on this data dashboard and for OAC’s (Official Artist Channels) in the future, so be sure to keep an eye out on The Daily Rind as we update you with the latest roll-outs.