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What is the impact of a youtube music video on music sales?


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If you post a video on youtube and it starts to get a lot of hits, how well or how poorly do those hits translate into sales of the song (or your other music) from your website? A friend of mine thinks that once you post a video on youtube you are going to lose a lot of potential sales because anyone can strip away the audio from the video and get the song for free. My own view is that 1) the exposure makes it worth the risk of giving the music away (if, in fact, it is true that you are going to give a lot of it away) plus 2) I have some evidence of a few music videos that went viral and the exposure translated almost immediately into roughly proportional sales at the artist’s website. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who knows first hand what the relation is in practice between putting a video up on youtube and the resulting effect on sales at the website. Thanks.

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Historically, the plays:sales ratio is something in the hundreds of thousands to one. It's not worth worrying about one way or the other, IMO. For every OK Go there are 80,000 other bands who do nothing through YT.

 

 

I agree. We are funny creatures; it's as if we're in a restaurant and we see a dish flying out of the kitchen that everyone is ordering. And we assume that it must be the serving dish and the waitress delivering it. So we go back to our own little restaurant and buy the same dishes and hire servers that look like the ones in the other place and then can't figure out why our food isn't flying out of the kitchen too.

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I have a few videos on youtube which have hit over 500k views. At first, I was cagey about it, worried out about lost sales.

 

Yes, people can very easily rip any youtube video into an mp3.

 

Yes, the risk of lost sales is worth the exposure. Youtube is THE #1 music streaming service, dwarfing Pandora, Spotify, Grooveshark, you name it.

 

The exposure from youtube plays does, in fact, lead back to song sales----provided that your music is worth buying in the first place. You can have the cutest video ever, but if the song is {censored}, it's not going to sell anyway.

 

Look, back in the glory-days of the record industry, the artist had to shell out millions of dollars for radio and MTV exposure. I'm so thankful we're no longer in that era, because it's inherently unfair to the artist. The risk of youtube ripping is well-worth the luxury of not having to suck radio and MTV's dicks.

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Thanks everyone for your comments. I’d like to say a bit more about our situation and see if any of you have any suggestions. We have a cd that was professionally recorded in a studio, as well as six songs that were either recorded in a studio or recorded by me. I am in the process of finishing up a video of one of our songs. Our lead singer/songwriter has ‘health issues’ (no, not a drug problem!) that has prevented us for two years from doing any kind of touring or even doing shows locally, but we expect that to change by summer. (bluestrat: we have great food but our restaurant was shut down by the department of health:)). In the meantime, we were thinking of getting the website up and running and seeing what kind of exposure we can get. That’s why we were thinking of putting the video up on youtube. So, we’re in kind of a unique situation but want to get our music “out there” somehow in the meantime. Any suggestions?

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Put the video up...it won't hurt you, and, as you can't play out live, hits will simply give you an indication if there is any interest in your music. If snything, YT will not necessarily translate to sales...make sure you leave a breadcrumb trail back to your FB page, website, etc.

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If it gets a lot of super lot of hits they'll put it on the radio. You've seen that with a couple recent breakthrough hits.

 

I love using Youtube to discover new music. What I do a lot is rip a lot of songs straight from Youtube to MP3, which is easy as cake. I mostly do this with interesting live performances and broadcasts of impossible-to-find 45s from way back when. There's a whole class of record nuts that put their finds on Youtube, or on their own blogs where they let you rip them for free. It's awesome.

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I would think that anyone who would go through the trouble of converting your youtube videos into mp3s and then burning them to a CD probably wasn't going to buy your album even if there was no Youtube. So, I think it's worth it for the exposure. That's my humble opinion. :)

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My $0.06

 

Any time we have had media coverage, it's generated sales. Songs on magazine covermount CDs does generate sales. Reviews in national magazines has generated sales. We've had a few tracks on youtube and, although it's had traffic, it hasn't conclusively led to sales, but it hasn't detracted either. Nothing wrong with some free advertising, IMO, especially if your video looks good!

 

What you have to consider is the cost of a campaign vs revenue generated. It's all well and good getting a good magazine review with cover art and generating a few sales. However, if what you spent on the review is way more than what your revenue it brings in, it's a moot point.

 

Generally, campaigns require planning and executing with precision detail. It's useless sticking a song on a covermount CD if that's the sum total of your activity for a few months. If you have a tour scheduled (or at least a good amount of dates with a national act), then a covermount CD and a review of your band's product is money well spent!

 

Just think of it as any product that gets advertised. Console manufacturers have this process down; just sit back, observe what they do and then do as they do!

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In my opinion the sites like Youtube have greatly effect the sales ratio of music, just for example few years back if you want to listen to songs or new music is launched you would go to market to buy it which helps a lot from singer point of view but now this ratio is decreased a lot but it has helped some as well, like the ones who don't have the money to launch their album or song can easily be published through such sites like Youtube.

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People just don't get it. It's apples and oranges. Videos or streaming music itself, do not directly relate to sales of the the music. It's all about overall brand awareness now and will lead to people becoming part of your "tribe" (as Seth Godin calls it) as an artist. I for instance do not buy music..AT ALL..I listen to it streamed online, on the radio and download Spotify tracks to my phone. I also have my entire library of classics that I digitized and put on a HD. About 1100 full albums. Many people are like me now. We're NEVER going back to buying songs or albums. We're NEVER going back to buying DVD's..That time has passed and it's now a new time with new methods of consuming which require new and innovative ways from which to generate revenue streams. If entertainment companies and record labels would simply think outside the box they could have monitized it all already, but instead AS ALWAYS they are trying to MAKE people consume they way THEY want, rather than letting consumers decide. This Ain't the 80's and it ain't the 90's and it ain't gonna work. Idiots..

 

 

Anyway, sorry for my tirade...To answer the question, Videos are worth a lot in exposure and brand awareness. They are a necessary advertising tool and they help you gain fans as a musician and artist. Do you know how many Millions of hits Youtube gets everyday and how many streams of music it plays?...More than every other streaming service COMBINED....Ya'll better get some videos up!!

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worth analyzing how tube channel promotion translate to sales, we haven't thought about doing that until now, but we now that any kind of exposure to the world also raises sales

 

thinking about people who rip tube videos to their computer with RealPlayer for listening on iPod and mobile phones isn't worth thinking about, the best way is to care about the paying costumer, of course the amount of people who rip anything is huge, enormously huge worldwide, but as said, getting frustrated about piracy takes away energy and time you better invest into buying consumers. It is the job of the legislation to reduce piracy, not the job of the artist or the distributor.

 

all exposure is promotion, today agreements include promotion paragraphs which permits the licensee to distribute videos of the artist to all tube channels for promotional purpose

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a word about people who waste time downloading online content to their computer

 

our logic tells us that this people not only waste time they could invest into work and earning a higher income, also they could anytime watch and listen the music & videos online without illegally owning the content, in other words we are dealing here with people who do not have the finances to buy what they rip, so it is not worth thinking about them in terms of marketing and profit

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a word about people who waste time downloading online content to their computer


our logic tells us that this people not only waste time they could invest into work and earning a higher income, also they could anytime watch and listen the music & videos online without illegally owning the content, in other words we are dealing here with people who do not have the finances to buy what they rip, so it is not worth thinking about them in terms of marketing and profit

 

I used to hold this same opinion, but I am finding that as the teenagers who were at the forefront of the dl/rip ripoff process a few years ago are aging into working adults, sadly this habit is not being subverted by increased disposable income, and in some cases they are just willing to invest in better software and hardware for this exact purpose. They still see this as a victimless crime...'if they didn't want me to do this, they would have made it so I couldn't...' :rolleyes:

 

But your other point is well made: worrying about lost potential sales that you can't possibly control is a waste of energy and thought time...far better spent on creating more IP... :thu:

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IMO YouTube can be a great resource for exposure. I will say that you need to learn to use it properly, though. I feel that YouTube is worthless if not directing your audience to your website (this also means you should have a website before you are uploading videos). I worked with one group that had 25,000+ views on their YouTube channel with only 10 videos uploaded... not bad. However, when I looked at the analytics for their website I didn't see any traffic, whatsoever, to their website from YouTube. To avoid this, put a link to your website as before any other text in the description of each video. You can (should) also you annotations to make your viewers aware of your URL. Unfortunately you can't make an annotation clickable unless it is asking your viewers to subscribe to your YouTube channel or it is pointing to another video on YouTube.

 

I did a bunch of research on YouTube at one point. I learned a lot from this article, this article and this article

 

I don't mean to shamelessly promote my own blog, but I did compile everything I learned from these articles and my experiences with my own clients in this post on my blog.

 

I hope that helps :)

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People just don't get it. It's apples and oranges. Videos or streaming music itself, do not directly relate to sales of the the music. It's all about overall brand awareness now and will lead to people becoming part of your "tribe" (as Seth Godin calls it) as an artist. I for instance do not buy music..AT ALL..I listen to it streamed online, on the radio and download Spotify tracks to my phone. I also have my entire library of classics that I digitized and put on a HD. About 1100 full albums. Many people are like me now. We're NEVER going back to buying songs or albums. We're NEVER going back to buying DVD's..That time has passed and it's now a new time with new methods of consuming which require new and innovative ways from which to generate revenue streams. If entertainment companies and record labels would simply think outside the box they could have monitized it all already, but instead AS ALWAYS they are trying to MAKE people consume they way THEY want, rather than letting consumers decide. This Ain't the 80's and it ain't the 90's and it ain't gonna work. Idiots..

 

I agree 100%, and I want to throw out for discussion my thoughts outside the traditional box regarding potential new revenue streams for digitally recorded music. Here's one idea.

 

It seems to me that the industry is solely focused on the inevitably futile endeavour of trying to control illegal downloads of digital music. What about trying to exploit uploads of digital music and consumer creativity? What if the industry and artists allowed for an interactive use of the digital recordings of their songs? What if, in an industry-standard and proprietary format to an industry-proprietary program, a consumer could, for the same small fee normally charged to download one .mp3 of a song, get something more valuable than they could get for free - a download of the separate multiple tracks a band or artist may have laid down for a song, which, using the proprietary program, the creative consumer could then remix with, volume, EQ, muting and unmuting tracks, adding effects, etc., however the creative consumer wanted to? What if the industry and independent artists then created a new market by allowing those consumer remixes of the songs to be uploaded (for a small fee) to the artists' or labels' web sites? The artists themselves could even sponsor contests for consumer remixes of their works, and judge which ones they think are the best. The promotional value and potential to reach new fans could be significant, while also generating profits. This could also open a new market via selling proprietary plugins for the proprietary program, and for new USB hardware designed to be used with the proprietary mixing program. Wouldn't the karaoke market alone would be enthralled with having the actual recordings of hits sans the vocal tracks? Also, a popular consumer remix would be derivative of the artist's original work that might keep songs on the radio longer or give old songs new life to generate additional royalty income for artists they would otherwise not have. A typical recording is just one, static snapshot of a song. It doesn't have to be that way. A recording of a song can be an interactive commodity in a new digital marketplace.

 

Anyway, just thinking about possible new revenue streams. :)

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A typical recording is just one, static snapshot of a song. It doesn't have to be that way. A recording of a song can be an interactive commodity in a new digital marketplace.

 

 

I think you're onto something here. The next generations of entertainment consumers are not going to be as satisfied with being passively entertained as their forebearers were. I expect concert to someday soon be interactive events where everyone in the audience with a smartphone will somehow be involved in the performance. We're just at the infantile stages with all this new technology--which is why nobody really knows what to do with it yet. But to think that live music and recorded music are dead, or that there is no money to be made in the new paradigms is absurd. Art and Commerce, like Life, will find a Way. They always do.

 

Somebody much more creative than I am will come up with a way to make a gazillion dollars using all this new technology to sell their music and we'll all be sitting around going "wow..that was so simple...why didn't I think of that?..."

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I agree 100%, and I want to throw out for discussion my thoughts outside the traditional box regarding potential new revenue streams for digitally recorded music. Here's one idea.


It seems to me that the industry is solely focused on the inevitably futile endeavour of trying to control illegal
downloads
of digital music. What about trying to
exploit uploads
of digital music and consumer creativity? What if the industry and artists allowed for an
interactive
use of the digital recordings of their songs? What if, in an industry-standard and proprietary format to an industry-proprietary program, a consumer could, for the same small fee normally charged to download one .mp3 of a song, get something more valuable than they could get for free - a download of the separate multiple tracks a band or artist may have laid down for a song, which, using the proprietary program, the creative consumer could then remix with, volume, EQ, muting and unmuting tracks, adding effects, etc., however the creative consumer wanted to? What if the industry and independent artists then created a new market by allowing those consumer remixes of the songs to be uploaded (for a small fee) to the artists' or labels' web sites? The artists themselves could even sponsor contests for consumer remixes of their works, and judge which ones they think are the best. The promotional value and potential to reach new fans could be significant, while also generating profits. This could also open a new market via selling proprietary plugins for the proprietary program, and for new USB hardware designed to be used with the proprietary mixing program. Wouldn't the karaoke market alone would be enthralled with having the actual recordings of hits sans the vocal tracks? Also, a popular consumer remix would be derivative of the artist's original work that might keep songs on the radio longer or give old songs new life to generate additional royalty income for artists they would otherwise not have. A typical recording is just one, static snapshot of a song. It doesn't have to be that way. A recording of a song can be an interactive commodity in a new digital marketplace.


Anyway, just thinking about possible new revenue streams.
:)

 

I think this is a great discussion. Get your audience involved.

 

In marketing we call this ownership bias. Once someone is involved with the creation process they will value it more. There are other simple ways that you can trigger this. Such as in the writing stage you can post two versions of a line from a song you are writing on FB and ask your fans to choose one or make a suggestion. Those who participate (even those who didn't but were paying attention) will be anxious to find out what you decided to use and will want to hear the song once it is recorded somewhere.

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