How To Market Your Music Through YouTube

PPeople love finding new bands online, and if your group is ready to broaden its fan base, creating a YouTube video is the way to go. The YouTube platform is enormous, offering endless potential for anyone with talent. In fact, a number of famous singers, including Justin Bieber and Carly Rae Jepsen were discovered this way, so it really is possible to make it big!

It’s important to take your YouTube music video shoot very seriously, as people don’t want to watch low-quality videos that don’t look or sound good. Taking the time to properly prepare will ultimately reward you with an excellent music video that you’re proud to market to fans and producers.

Image credit: sko11ie on Flickr

Producing A High Quality Video

Your music video needs to showcase your band’s natural talent, so recording it with a high-quality camera is a must. Don’t worry if you can’t afford to rent out a studio with fancy equipment – you can purchase an HD camera for a few hundred dollars, or even borrow one from a connection, that will produce a professional grade video. After getting the camera, the next step is ensuring you’ve got excellent microphones to record your song. Unless it somehow fits in with your performance, you’ll probably want to use external microphones, as it’s not the best look to tote one around, cord and all, on video. Next you’ll need to find a tripod to hold the video camera, as the last thing you want is your camera being held by a person with wobbly hands, causing your video to make viewers feel like they’re on a roller coaster.

Before shooting the video, take a few trial runs to ensure the camera is filming from the best spot and the sound is working just as you want it. Although this should go unsaid, practice for your video over and over again, until you can’t bear to practice anymore! You want the song and whatever it is that you’ll be doing in the video to be second nature to you, so it looks natural onscreen. Viewers can spot amateurs from a mile away, so you’ll need to give it your all to allow your band’s talent to really talent shine.

Choosing Video Content

As a group of talented musicians, your band probably has many original songs you’re anxious to share with people on YouTube. While this is great and you should definitely share this music soon, you may want to hold off on using an original song as your introductory video. When building your initial following, it can be a good idea to record a cover song to use as your first YouTube hit. Choose something that is popular with your fan base, so they’ll be sure to find it when conducting searches for the song. When they hear how well you perform songs they already know and love, they’ll be eager to hear more of your original hits. In addition to posting the cover song, it can also be a good idea to put an interview with your band up on YouTube. This is a more intimate way for people to learn a little more about you, so they can see what you’re all about.

Marketing Your YouTube Video(s)

Your work does not end with posting your music video on YouTube. It’s important to make sure you’ve tagged it with proper keywords, so users will be able to find it. When they type these keywords in, your video will appear in their search results, both on YouTube and Google. Posting links to your video on your Facebook and Twitter pages is also essential, to let fans know it’s there, so they can check it out. Eventually, after your band has created a few more videos, you may even want to create your own YouTube channel.
Don’t settle for posting anything less than the best quality on YouTube. Take your time to create a high-quality video that really does your music justice. All you need is one really great video for people to recognize your true talent. Effectively marketing your music through YouTube takes a great deal of work, but the payoff can be enormous.

Sara Collins is a writer for NerdWallet, a site that helps readers learn about personal finance topics like finding the best mortgage rates.