YouTube has upwards of 2.7 billion users worldwide and over 800 million videos on its website. For musicians, it remains one of the best places to post and promote their music, and benefit from the platform’s long-form content structure. All it takes is one music video, cover video, lyric video, or loop of a song’s visual component to blow up and have you and your work get well-deserved recognition.
A Youtube link (or SoundCloud link) – private or public – is all you need to send your music to the media and music industry pros of your choice that are available on Groover! Find the 2,000 Youtube channels, playlists, radios, blogs and labels directly in your account.
Here’s how to promote your music on YouTube:
1. Use Youtube Ads to Increase Your Visibility On the Platform
This is the most obvious way to promote music directly on Youtube because ads are ubiquitous on the platform.
Ads on Youtube are super customizable and can be placed in different spots:
- Ads that appear directly on the YouTube home page to shortcut a potential viewer to your YouTube channel
- Ads associated with keywords that appear when a user searches on YouTube (feel free to use a keyword tool to help you out!)
- Ads broadcast before/during/after a video
- Ads visible only on mobile phones
To start creating ads on Youtube, you need to have a YouTube account and create a Google Adwords account. If you’ve already done ads on Facebook and Instagram, you’ll notice that the process is similar.
To create your Youtube ad, you have to choose:
- The video you want to boost
- The format of the ad and its location (in a video, in a search, etc.)
- A target audience
- A determined budget that will be linked to the cost per click or per view
Feel free to experiment with different formats for Youtube ads and follow up on them regularly to understand which one works best for promoting your music! Remember, targeting your Youtube ads is key. It’s a powerful tool that can be harnessed by using the resources made available by Google to help users get ads.
2. Get Your Youtube Channel Verified
Verification is a dream on many platforms like Spotify, Apple Music and/or Instagram, but perhaps the platform on which verification has the greatest impact is Youtube. Verifying your channel often attracts more attention and credibility, and provides you with exclusive benefits:
- gives you access to detailed stats
- improves the SEO of your channel
- allows you to promote your merch and tours directly under your Youtube videos
To request verification on your channel, you must have posted at least three videos. You can then approach the YouTube support team and make your request.
3. Make Music Videos and Clips that Illustrate Your Music
On an artist’s YouTube channel, you’d expect to find visuals for their music, so make sure you have visual content that is engaging enough to keep viewers watching, even if they don’t know the song. Including the song title in the video is crucial for better SEO on video sharing platforms like YouTube, and will allow any intrigued listeners to move over to a streaming platform to add your song to their music library.
On YouTube, clips are king, so we advise you to upload as consistently as possible! Image is inseparable from music, especially on YouTube, which remains a platform for music and entertainment. In addition, short clips are the perfect material to promote with for Youtube Ads.
4. Offer a Variety of Content On Your Channel
As an artist, your YouTube channel is mainly used to post and promote your music videos, but there are plenty of other ways to showcase your work on Youtube. Users enjoy learning more about the lives of creators and artists, and this is reflected in the popularity of vlogs on the platform. You can totally – if you have the time and the inclination – offer other video formats on Youtube, be it vlogs, behind the scenes videos, or your musical influences… this will allow you to build a real community around your project. All of this extra content you offer is what contributes to the storytelling that is so important in increasing the visibility of your music.
You can also create curated playlists for your fans to listen to. This is a great way for your fanbase to get to know you and listen to your music, as well as music you like. This is a key promotional tool for any independent artist to gain listeners and subscribers.
5. Use Keywords
The title of the YouTube video is crucial because it must allow you to get as much out of the search as possible and grab a user’s attention. Don’t forget to write a suitable description and add relevant tags to each of your videos; including keywords in the video description is essential to improve visibility and increase views, as it can help a user find the video without knowing the title.
Keep the title short and straight to the point for your live videos and music videos, such as your song name and artist name. For your other videos, you can analyze what is working the most at the moment on YouTube and adapt the content, title, and description with potentially trending keywords in the tags (as long as they are relevant). Youtube Autocomplete and Google Trends are good tools to find the keywords searched by language and country and to know the associated trends.
For example, you can find YouTube searches for “jazz piano” worldwide over the last 30 days. You will also find related searches and where those terms are searched, and you can also compare with similar terms to see which ones are most searched:
6. Create Intriguing Thumbnails
Now that your video is visible on the platform, you want as many users as possible to click on it. The thumbnail should attract attention and make people want to know more. In general, colorful images are what catch the eye, but the picture quality is most important. If it is blurry or poorly framed, it suggests that the video is also poor quality. We therefore advise you to remember to take pictures/stills when you record a video for your channel to ensure a good result. You can also do simple edits using apps like Canva.
7. Create a Connection With Your Audience
Listening and building relationships with subscribers is super important in order to increase your YouTube subscriber count and showcase your music online. We advise you to like and respond to certain comments on your posts to create a dialogue with your audience and be engaged. The YouTube Studio App allows you to manage your profile, easily create playlists and reply to comments directly on a mobile!
Youtube Studio : Perfect for music promotion
You can also make community posts that allow you to tease future videos, talk about new updates you may have and stay in touch with your new fans. These posts can be plain text, or contain images, videos, GIFs, Youtube playlists, or even a poll.
8. Collaborate With Other Artists and Creators
YouTube is full of talented creators and artists. A great way to reach more people is to do collabs and combine your fanbases. Whether it’s a purely musical collaboration or something more general with a creator of the platform, all ideas can bring visibility to your Youtube channel and allow you to gain subscribers that may not have seen your content otherwise. Contact the artists and creators who you would like to work with via the email address provided in the ‘About’ tab of their channel or on social networks.
9. Boost Your Other Platforms With Youtube
With YouTube, you can also boost the visibility of your other platforms! Every video you post is a showcase for your music and the description allows you to talk about your other channels. Feel free to place a cross-platform link in your bio and at the end of the descriptions under your videos to direct viewers to your other socials where they can find more content.
To promote a future release or clip, you can simply post teasers and invite users to follow you on Spotify or YouTube Music, for example, to find all your songs as soon as they are released.
10. Place Your Video on Popular YouTube Channels
Getting your music video a placement on a popular YouTube channel is a great way to spread the word about your latest track and redirect people to your personal YouTube channel. There are many channels that offer this in all musical styles, and some curators even offer to post the songs with animations or to post the lyrics. Some placements are paid and others are not, so don’t hesitate to ask the channel manager via their email, often indicated in the “about” tab.
You can also submit your music to YouTube channels directly on Groover! It’s affordable, really effective in gaining visibility, and you are assured to have a response in under 7 days from a music business pro. Most importantly, you’re guaranteed to get your music heard! Find the list of contacts available on Groover, with a selection of more than 2,000 channels, playlists, radio stations, media, record labels,…all available to you in your account.
– Translated by Betty Gonzalez Gray –
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Next Articles :
> How to attract a community on Youtube?
> How does the Youtube algorithm work?
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Send your music to the channels and other industry pros of your choice directly on Groover now!