Want to link from your YouTube video to your site...or iTunes?

This is a killer update from YouTube and something that every artist I work with has wanted to be able to do for sometime.

You can now create an annotation in a video on YouTube and link it so people can click through directly to your site or to your music on iTunes or a whole host of other places.

Well, you can....if you're a premium partner. 

And I know most DIY musicians aren't.

So having gotten you all excited, sorry to dash your hopes, but there are a whole load of DIY and Indie musicians who are already premium partners on YouTube and if that doesn't include you, it's yet another incentive to make YouTube a major priority.

Plus, of course, often the features that first appear on premium partner channels find their way to all of us.

Here's hoping.

Here's the link to YouTube to read all about it.

New YouTube Channels allow off-site links!

Happy New Year.

I owe this one to @ThornyBleeder who posted about it over the holidays.

The post is on Social Times and sets out how to redesign your channel after the new makeover that YouTube has had.

The big notable improvement is that you can now have links to your site and social media profiles from your Channel page - every artist should go and add these now. The article tells you how:

...covers the ins and outs of the new site design, starting with the new YouTube channel design and layout.

If you haven’t visited your YouTube channel since the redesign then you’re in for a surprise.  Not only can you now post links in the sidebar of your channel, but YouTube is also now offering a series of layout templates, a new Feed and more.  Not sure where to get started?  Not to worry.  We’ll take you through all the steps of getting your new YouTube channel set up.

Read the article here.

And you can check out the quick spruce up and off-site links we have made to our YouTube channel here - http://www.youtube.com/MakeItInMusic.

8 ways to maximize your YouTube Presence

I thought that we'd covered this post when it was published on Social Media Examiner in July, but we didn't!

And, this week I have been doing a lot of work on YouTube - how to get your videos noticed and spreading. It's not easy but there are some tricks that we're testing at the moment. We'll let you know how they do.

The one KEY that we have missed before in our efforts for our artists (even though we've pointed it out in other posts!) is to use YouTube as a social network. The younger you are the more you probably do this (that's what the demographics show) but most don't. What does that mean? - well, add friends, ask them to subscribe, create favourites and get liking videos (and ask for likes back).

All that interactivity seriously boosts your channel and videos inside YouTube's ranking algorithm - more so if you can get views, comments, favourites and likes within the first 48 hours of uploading. This is a GREAT thing to ask your fans to do for you by emailing them and asking them to log in to YouTube and watch the video and favourite it, comment on it or like it.

This MASSIVELY increases your chances to appear in the 'recommended' or 'related' video lists which in turn exposes you to a wider audience.

We're trying to test how well this works - and it looks good - and we have a few other tips that we hope will make these 'best practice' approaches work even better.

It's also becoming clear that having your video embedded off YouTube on third party sites is a BIG deal to YouTube and proves that your video is hot - and hence they want to encourage more people to see it. Again, getting your video embedded on other people's blogs as soon as possible after you upload it becomes a marketing goal.

So, if and when we get some specific feedback from our own efforts, we'll let you know.

In the meantime, as I said at the top - I came across this post again in my search for tips.

It has some great basic tips that you MUST be using. Check it out here.

And here's the video from one of those tips. We've only just started adding this to our videos, but it works in a big way! An annotation that links directly to the 'subscribe' button for your channel. This video shows the old layout, but it explains it well. I'd recommend adding a 'Subscribe to us for more videos' annotation to every video you have on YouTube.

It WILL increase your subscriptions and that will help your YouTube marketing. Best tip - have the subscription come up at least twice, maybe three times. First time after 20 sconds or so, second time just after half way and thirdly, right at the end as the video ends.

How to be EVERYWHERE

This video is a run through of Pat Flynn's Blog World presentation.

His original post with links to the things he mentions is here.

Follow Pat on Twitter here.

Pat is a well known marketer online who has created a very large audience for himself through his open and honest marketing methods.

He talks about how to promote a blog or products online, but what he says can be applied to promoting music pretty much wholesale.

In this video he talks about the three biggest ways that his blog has been discovered and where the majority of his followers come from.

And they are:

iTunes (because of his podcast);

YouTube;

Links from other blogs

Although the concept of creating valuable useful content that applies to bloggers who teach something (how to blog, how to surf, what's the best camera etc, etc) isn't 100% applicable to how you can spread your music and your brand as a musician, there are many lessons in here that you can adapt.

Podcasting is a great way to get your fans in tune with you, your tastes and your music - an effective way to bring your tribe (as Seth Godin calls them) closer to you. Those podcasts can be about your music and what's happening with your band and career but they can also be about the wider world of music - with elements that relate to your music.

And, as we said in this post - Why musicians should be bloggers - there is a MASSIVE opportunity for musicians to place themselves at the centre of a niche, genre or scene by becoming the authority blog on that particular scene. The strategies that Pat talks about here are then very useful for building an audience.

In short, every musician trying to get noticed should be looking to get a presence in places where there are huge numbers of people looking for music and info/news about music - YouTube, blogs and iTunes are obvious places for that.

Watch and you will get some great ideas!

 

YouTube allows stores!

We went YouTube crazy a while ago - believing that it was the most essential place any musician should have a profile. The traffic is huge and the opportunities enormous.

We're even more convinced now.

And, this latest development adds the ability to sell your wares right on YouTube via integration with various partners such as Topspin.

Through a feature called the Merch Store, YouTube partners will be able to sell artist merchandise, digital downloads, concert tickets and other experiences to fans and visitors. YouTube has partnered with a number of companies to launch these stores. Topspin is helping power merchandise sales, concert tickets and experiences; SongKick will help sell tickets for concerts; and iTunes and Amazon will power transactions for music downloads.

Read about this development on Techcrunch here.

How to use YouTube

A new post on the main site where you'll want to download YouTube's own 'Creator Playbook'

It's very useful!

Learn how to use YouTube here.

YouTube tell you what to do to get best results

This is BRILLIANT and I owe @DannyDee for pointing it out.

YouTube is preparing a 'Partner Playbook' for those lucky enough to have a YouTube Partner channel (where YouTube pays you because you get great traffic).

But, this piece on Social Times is written by someone who was at the YouTube Partner conference and where YouTube's Ryan Nugent gave an hour long presentation on best practice.

OK, so it's not targeted to musicians using YouTube but pretty much anyone making video and using YouTube to virally spread them can learn a lot from this.

Creating great content is, without a doubt, the most important ingredient in the recipe to YouTube success.  However, even if you have the best content on the planet, nobody will see it if you haven’t optimized it for discovery.  Ryan Nugent of YouTube’s Next Up Lab says, “50% of the work is making a great video and the other 50% is what you do when you upload it.”  Here, we lay out some helpful rules and guidelines for optimizing your content, as outlined in Ryan’s presentation of the YouTube Partner Playbook.

Check out the Social Times piece here.

And watch the YouTube video here. No, really, do. It could be the best use of an hour of your time!

You MUST put your music on YouTube

Another great post from Prescription PR and one that justifies the use of a James Blunt photo!

Okay, so you lucked out and somehow managed to slip one past Geoff Smith and get a spot play on Radio 2. Millions of listeners all over the UK have just heard your 3 minutes of radio-friendly-two-tone-emo-shoe-gazing-nu-metal-folk-soul. Which means you’re now going to sell a load of singles, yeah?

As is ever the case with these articles, dear reader, the answer is no (and sorry about that). What will probably happen is this: around 0.01% of the people who heard Jeremy Vine interrupt calls from inane members of the public to play your song might be interested in hearing the tune again - but for free. And if they like it enough, then they might consider paying to download the track (or, since it’s Radio 2 listeners we’re talking about, see if they can find a 78 in an antiques shop in Rye). Either way, when they've got a little more acquainted with your music they may, heaven forbid, finally take the plunge and purchase your whole album. The main thing is: they've got to be able to hear that radio-friendly song again.

Read it here.

 

YouTube Music chart is a goldmine

So, if you missed it last week, YouTube announced their own music chart based on a "holistic view of song popularity".

Read the DIY Musician piece on this here.

I was quite amazed by how many of the Top 100 are not this week's hits, but are songs that have been out a while. Not sure what it means as we have no idea what YouTube is measuring, but it's not what I'd expected.

So, why is it a goldmine?

Well, this is YouTube telling you what are the most popular songs so that you can do a response video or a cover video - or use that information for some other purpose that you can come up with.

I can't find an RSS feed for that page, but I have feeds in my reader for the following for the same reason:

Most Viewed Today

Most Viewed Week

Most Viewed Month

Top Favourites Today

Top Rated Today

Recently Featured

You can find how to get these feeds here - http://www.youtube.com/t/rss_feeds

A lot of the videos in these aren't music, so the new chart is a bonus.

I'd recommend all aspiring musicians look at these videos and charts regularly to see what songs are getting views globally and perhaps to make some videos that will get views off the back of their popularity.

But - beware the covers game. I'm a fan, but this Hypebot article illustrates the danger.

 

Killer YouTube Idea

I think there might only be one post today, but I'll do more if I get the time.

This therefore needs to be a good one - and it is!

Go to YouTube and watch this - awesome YouTube video.

Now, think about how this could be used by an artist!

The first person to do something like this is going to get massive publicity.

I know that it might be out of reach for most indie or diy musicians, and you seem to have to be a YouTube partner to run something like that on an iFrame on YouTube, BUT, don't let that stop you thinking about trying to come up with amazing ideas for your music promotion.

We looked at another YouTube Viral method here, which is doable by anyone with a camera phone, some time and access to Google to work out how to do it!

Custom Backgrounds for YouTube and Twitter

I've been asked about this a LOT in the last few weeks.

And, I'm remiss, as I haven't done our YouTube channel background properly (it's just the logo) and our Twitter one is a simple repeated logo! It's on the very long list of things to do.

However, we do try and make sure that our clients have a custom background for Twitter and YouTube that fit with their site design. Some are prepared to invest the small-ish cost of getting a designer to do this and some aren't. YouTube is tricky to do well if you don't have Photoshop skills!

Nonetheless, it's what we recommend. A consistent look across your own website and your social media profiles is obviously a good idea - just look at what major label artists do to see the consistency of their look! In fact, look into what they do all the time in social media and steal their best ideas!

This oldish post on Mashable has some good pointers and is worth checking out - although the dimensions listed for Twitter are now wrong for the new layout - check our post here (point 2) instead for that.

If you Google 'YouTube Background', you'll get loads of detailed info and endless videos that show you how to do it if you have the skills.

Obviously, if one of you in the band is a designer or if the people that designed your site can do the backgrounds, you're sorted.

However, if you are after an all-in-one solution, check out these people - Custom Page. We've used them several times for various backgrounds and they will be doing ours for Make It In Music when we get five minutes!

The quality is good and they're reasonably priced and they deal with the photoshop stuff that gives me a headache!

That said, they have lots of free backgrounds that you can use as well, and a really good tutorial on how to make your own here.

 

How to focus your efforts on YouTube

Great article by Jon Ostrow at Mic Control.

Jon looks at why video on YouTube is so crucial to your promotional efforts and what types of video you can make to maximise the ways that fans can find, watch and listen to your music.

Think about it - if a blog takes your song and uploads it to hulkshare or even uses a track embedding plugin on their blog, people can listen to your music but the road ends there. However, if you give bloggers the opportunity to share your music through a Youtube video, you are giving ALL of their readers the opportunity to not just listen, but turn around and share the video with their friends as well. And of course, many blog readers are themselves bloggers, who find new music through a blog they follow, and then turn around and promote the same artist. With a Youtube video being the piece de resistance, you have significantly increased the likelihood of a feature from multiple bloggers.

Read the whole piece here.

How can unsigned artists make money on YouTube?

I had a real spate of YouTube posts a month or so ago - and today I couldn't resist this one from the BBC.

It's a great review of how several unsigned artists are making a living almost entirely from their activities on YouTube.

You might not want to build your name around covers or what some would see as more comedy than music, but you can't deny that there are things you can learn from these artists and their YouTube activity.

You might also want to check out one of our posts on YouTube for musicians on the main blog.

A growing number of musicians are establishing their careers on YouTube, with little or no financial outlay. Last year, an unsigned band from New York even entered the Billboard charts courtesy of their online fanbase.

The Gregory Brothers first came to attention with their "auto-tune the news" series, where political debates and press conferences were transformed into miniature operas, thanks to pitch-shifting computer software.

The Gregory Brothers insert themselves into news footage to duet with political leaders.

Early videos saw Hilary Clinton singing about Somalian pirates, while the US Congress debated climate change as a call-and-response gospel song.

"Singing is happening all the time when we're talking, but our brains are just too feeble to parse it as music," explains Michael Gregory. "I can change that in the studio."

The clips, equal parts technical experiment and political satire, became a word-of-mouth success, much to the band's surprise.

Read the post here.

And here's a video from the Gregory Brothers to illustrate the point.

 

Great song + YouTube = Hit

 

So, here's me sticking my neck out.....a bit.

This song was tipped by Record of the Day today - so maybe I'm just jumping on the bandwagon!

I'm not going to say a great deal other than this guy is obviously really talented and this song is truly great. It fulfills the things that we mentioned in this piece the other day about James Blunt - honesty and clarity in songwriting.

I'm well aware that this sort of song, style and genre really annoys a lot of 'artists' - as being too cliched, soft, lacking in edge (and a whole host of things). That's up to you, but don't delude yourself that you can't learn from it.

I'd go as far as to say that this song feels nearly as big as Blunt's 'Your'e Beautiful' did when it first came out. That's the bit where I stick my neck out. Maybe it is, maybe not. It's still great.

The YouTube element is clear too. It's a simple well shot one take performance and he's obviously built a small following up from previous songs on YouTube. But, this is where people are coming to discover him and send their friends - sure, radio is now spreading it.

But where do you send your mates to hear it? YouTube.

 

YouTube, Blogs and the Future of Music

Jon Ostrow (@MicControl) put me on to this yeterday.

Great interview with one of the founders of Elektra where he talks about how he sees music promotion today.

Watch it and get some ideas!

A YouTube case study

OK, last thing on YouTube for a while. I know I'm hammering the point, perhaps a little too much! Point 8 in this post - Build your fanbase - didn't get the message across enough!

The Midnight Beast is a trio doing what most would call comedy pop - a bit electro and a bit rap.

I am in awe of the following that they have built pretty much using YouTube alone.

I'm not saying that you have to be a comedy act - although I accept that their particular style is VERY suited to video, YouTube, covers/parodies etc - but what they have across all the platforms that they use is well worth looking at.

Their official site is all about video (I'd add an email sign up too, but you can't get everything right!), and their other social media profiles are all spot on too - regular Twitter and Facebook updates, although they use personal Twitter far better than the band feed.

And, they are unsigned. And, don't want to be signed. They just sold out their first UK tour and are selling loads of merchandise - follow their links to see what they do using Big Cartel.

They have over 200,000 subscribers on YouTube and I'm sure that's a Partner channel, so they'll be earning more that way.

OK, their kick-off was a Kesha parody that got people following them in their droves, and they can write very catchy songs or parodies (some of the material is original), but there is nothing stopping you making your band very focused on YouTube and getting a massive boost from people finding you there.

Learn how to stand out by studying what The Midnight Beast do.......and apply it.

The Midnight Beast channel on YouTube.

The Guardian view.

Wikipedia tell all on the Midnight Beast.

The official Midnight Beast site.

An example of their highbrow work!

Video is dead.....long live Video

Following on rather perfectly from my post yesterday - What's the best way to get noticed? - comes this from the Midem blog.

Adrian Pope - a master digital marketer at Europe's largets indie label / distributor - gives his thoughts on the death of the traditional promo video and the rise of cheaply created content.

It has some great ideas that you can apply to your band.

How many music promo videos really jump out as memorable? Radiohead’s Street Spirit? Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice? Yep, it’s subjective and I guess you can think of lots if you really put your mind to it, but for years the music business has been commissioning and producing promo videos in an often formulaic fashion whilst treating it a as a key tool in any marketing campaign.

Read the post here.

Get a record deal via YouTube

I love that this has happened and that it vindicates many of the strategies of online music promotion that I and my ilk have been putting forward.

Ahmir, an R&B act who have developed a massive YouTube following largely by recording vocally impressive covers of current hits, have just signed to a successful label that can take them to the mainstream industry.

I think that perhaps they didn't actually need a deal but that highlights something we don't often talk about - the easiest access to mainstream writers & producers (that an R&B act like this needs) and to radio and TV is through the major label system. Or certainly through the connections and networks that they still have the most hold over - but that will change over time.

That doesn't mean that you can't do it DIY, but there is still a place for the machine - especially in pop and R&B.

Watch their video below and go and read the pieces on MusicMarketing.com which put me on to the story.

This piece has the story about Ahmir.

But, in particular - read this piece - which looks at how the intelligent use of covers (or perhaps samples a la Black Eyed Peas?) brings your band to a whole new audience.

Make your music video go viral

Mashable - brilliant post about various techniques that you can use to help your music video go viral.

YouTube music marketing is one of the essential ways that you can now get your music heard - you need to be using it as much as possible and these ideas can help.

They say that Internet killed the video star (or the Limousines did, but still). We would beg to differ. The web has opened up a tour bus-full of opportunities for bands hoping to get their music out there via the cinematic medium.

And to back up that assertion, we’ve talked with musicians, including Cee-Lo Green, Auto-Tune the News and OK Go, and gathered together their top tips for making an eminently shareable music video.

In the past, the realm of music videos was a whole lot less democratic — but that’s all changed dramatically in recent years.

Go and read it here.

And then, like they say....there's always cats!

YouTube can break an artist

Got this Billboard article from a recent Bob Lefsetz email. It's an interview with Justin Bieber's manager, Scooter Braun.

Go and read it as it tells us a lot about the man, but also about Bieber and how he was discovered. Not least it has a telling indictment on all the major label A&R's who turned the kid down.

Now, whether you like Bieber or not and whether you believe he has a long term career or not (the article suggests that he is thinking how to make sure he does!), the fact that those talented, deep thinking, artist loving A&R men mostly couldn't see his massive success, tells us all we need to know.

Plus, they didn't believe that YouTube could break an artist.

You might not be or want to be the boy wonder Bieber, but YouTube is now ESSENTIAL to your success - a key part of your online music promotion. Managers and A&R men are now trawling it looking for future talent. So are fans.

Use it.

THR: What was the most common reason they gave you when turning him down?
Braun: They all said the same thing: that he's too young and no one's broken from YouTube. “Where's the platform? Go get a TV show, you can't compete with Disney or Nickelodeon.”

Read the whole article here.