Side Project: Growing A YouTube Music Channel

FIRST CHAPTER: INTRODUCTION



YouTube music channels are a dime a dozen. Especially when it comes to EDM (Electronic Dance Music) promotion channels.
Out of five hundred 14-years old EDM-lovers, at least four hundred (rough estimate) have their own YouTube channel, where they upload some of their favorite tracks from monstercat to "promote" those artists.

"Find a niche with low competition" they said. "Don't go for a totally oversaturated market" they said. "Lol nah" I am saying and now I invite you all to follow my journey on doing exactly the opposite: Growing another YouTube music channel!



Who I am

I will do this project together with a good friend I've been knowing since kindergarten. I am 20 years old and currently studying Media Informatics (Webdevelopment) in Germany and my friend is currently jobbing as Social Media Manager for some German soccer clubs.
While we already have some expirience with YouTube in other niches, we are total newbs when it comes to the music business. One of our main goals is to improve our skills in Social Media Marketing, because we both toy with the idea of working in this sector later.
This journey thread will be from my perspective only, my friend isn't a member of blackhatworld.



What's the plan?

We want to grow a YouTube channel dedicated to EDM. We will upload some royalty free music to attract viewers and we will upload tracks from underground EDM artists that don't run their own YouTube channel but got a bunch of followers on soundcloud (with their permission of course). Hopefully, we get them to promote our project, so some of their followers subscribe to our YouTube channel and become recurring viewers.
Our uploads will be automatically shared on a bunch of different social networks and blogs (those backlinks should be enough to outrank competitors) and we will also do some Guerilla Marketing to promote our uploads (I will go more in detail later)
For the moment our content will be monetized with AdSense only. We will consider more ways to make money from our channel when we got the ball rolling.



Starting situation

We had the idea of starting such a channel around one year ago already. We registered a YouTube account with a nice name back then and uploaded one music video from an artist we know. This is actually nice, because we got around 50 subs and 10k views already and don't have to start all over again, plus the channel is a bit aged already. Unfortunately the channel got one copyright strike from a video I uploaded for test purposes a few months ago, but it will expire in around 2 months.



Purpose of this journey thread:

I feel like I've learned a lot about Social Media Marketing in the last year and I want to share some of my knowledge with people that are new to SMM. Furthermore, there is much to learn for me and I hope to get some good advice from the experts among us.





If you have any questions, feel free to ask!
Would you be interested in regular updates?

I definitely would like to know how to grow a YouTube music channel! Please post regular updates if you can! Good luck!

Interested! I'm almost in the same niche! xD Almost!

Maybe I'll get inspired from this!

Tip: Search "10likes?" on YouTube and filter by today, or even this week. Drop a like on a bunch of videos and comment saying that you dropped a like and that they should check out your channel - trust me, most of them will subscribe and be a recurring viewer. I got 50 subscribers doing this for a few hours or so

Also, reach out to other music channels and ask them if they want to collaborate by putting each other in the subscription box (now known as "Featured Channel"-box).

Best of luck!

hekke said:

Tip: Search "10likes?" on YouTube and filter by today, or even this week. Drop a like on a bunch of videos and comment saying that you dropped a like and that they should check out your channel - trust me, most of them will subscribe and be a recurring viewer. I got 50 subscribers doing this for a few hours or so

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Worth a try. I just commented on around 50 "10 likes?"-videos. Let's see if I get some subscribers from that.

Also, reach out to other music channels and ask them if they want to collaborate by putting each other in the subscription box (now known as "Featured Channel"-box).

Click to expand...

Yes, I will do that. I am in touch with some channel owners already and I will ask them to feature us, as soon as we are ready to launch.

stacy666 said:

Interested! I'm almost in the same niche! xD Almost!

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GTFO my niche xD

Will you share the adsense profit with those EDM artists? Do they know that your are monetizing their EDM songs?

Kalar said:

Will you share the adsense profit with those EDM artists? Do they know that your are monetizing their EDM songs?

Click to expand...

Sure they know, we cannot monetize the videos without getting permission from them.
However we agree with the artist on using the money to promote our channel or their track on our channel. Revenue cannot be shared because we aren't a registered business. It won't be much anyway, especially not in the beginning.

Goodluck on your journey! Looking forward how it goes! I also have a promotion channel but it grows very slow. I'm now on 530 subs.

SECOND CHAPTER: PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS


Corporate Identity:


I've created a simple, textbased logo in Adobe Photoshop which will be used in our videos and as profile pic for all our social media accounts later. (Pro tipp: In almost every case you should try to create a logo that can fit into a square. Logos in e.g. 16:9 are totally impractical for social media)
Me and my friend also decided for a font and a rough farb scheme we're going to use in videos, images and on the website. We choosed "Open Sans" with a font-weight of 100.
We will not develop a detailed Corporate Identity, since we're mainly operating on social networks which means we are bound to their standards and will be unable establish our Corporate Identity completely anyway.




Unique Selling Proposition (USP):

Developing an USP is an often overlooked, but extremely important element of creating an new YouTube channel. Why should people subscribe to us and not to one of the other thousand channels that provide similar content?


I personally believe that sometimes it's not really about developing an Unique-Selling-Proposition. In our case, claiming we're bringing "only the best, handpicked tracks from creative artists" will do the job.
If you repeat something over and over, people will believe it.
Our audience will feel like this makes us unique, even though pretty much every other channel in this niche basically does the same.




Target Audience:


Before creating any kind of content it's essential to define the audience you will be interacting with / the audience you try to attract. You talk different to a kid in primary school than to your father, don't you? It's actually common sense, but you need to keep it in mind.


I will keep this section short, because especially in music niche the audience is very broad, even for EDM. A typical potential subscriber would be a 14-20 years old male, that likes Electronic Music and owns a smartphone. Enough said.
People at that age are usually in puberty in developing their own style. Everyone wants to be different. Unique. Guess why there are so many hipsters around. And what's one of the best ways to express you are unique? Music. Music which no one else listens to. Music from underground artists. Music that sounds experimental and creative. Music - from our channel.
Note: This does not mean that we only want people that fit the scheme I described above to subscribe to our channel it's just an estimate what the majority of our audience will look like. Of course 75 years old grannys are allowed to listen to our music too

Some of you guys already spotted me on youtube (you should really get yourself some hobbies)

Since I got asked:
This journey is a few weeks delayed. I wrote this text around 3 weeks ago, but simply didn't know where to publish it. I will post 2-3 more updates that have happened in the past, but then report in realtime.

THIRD CHAPTER: LET'S GET IT STARTED


Setting up the website


What's cooler? Telling an artist or a label about your project via email / chat OR sending them a link to your fancy, mindblowing website where they find all the information they need? You get the idea, don't you?
Having a decent website instantly makes your brand look alot more professional. There are very few channels that have a website, so just by creating a decent one I catapult my project into the top 20%. People trust websites. The majority doesn't know that basically everyone can get a .com domain for $10 per year.

So today I've purchases an exact matching .net domain for my project. Unfortunately .com is already taken. For my purpose, this isn't a big deal. The website won't be that important for the project since there will only be our portfolio and a sign up form for artists on it. There is some competition on the keyword in Google but I'm pretty sure we can outrank them all in a couple of weeks.
I already have a hosting at 1and1 and I was able to simply addon the domain and didn't have to purchase another hosting. I then installed wordpress and searched for a fancy theme. I decided to go with "Harmony" (www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/harmony/), because I really love the simplicity of the theme.
I ended up with writing a short text about our project for the home page and I also created a track submission form using the "Ninja Forms" plugin.

I do enjoy EDM so if you told me the name, i would be very interested in checking it out.

looks interesting good luck

That's always a nice idea in music to create a channel in order to gather multiple artists that don't have time to build their own channel.

In the underground music industry, your first subscribers will be artists mainly. You have to offer them exposure, in exchange of their dedication to your channel, and maybe promotion.
I was in the hiphop industry for a while, and underground artists are listened by underground artists. So that should be your goal.

Once you have your website / youtube channel, you should get Facebook dominator & start joing groups / liking page related to EDM.
Get 50 accounts & proxies and starts blasting your videos. This will help rank them in youtube, but also show the artists that this is a growing channel.

Once you're there well... let's get there first

Another way to earn money by placing songs on YouTube is offering download link, CPA as ADFLY, so the more download more money

Much success on this is wished for you. Good luck.

JustinKowalsky said:

I do enjoy EDM so if you told me the name, i would be very interested in checking it out.

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I guess I will "reveal" the channel soon since so many people asked.

TayaX said:

[...] Once you have your website / youtube channel, you should get Facebook dominator & start joing groups / liking page related to EDM.
Get 50 accounts & proxies and starts blasting your videos. This will help rank them in youtube, but also show the artists that this is a growing channel.

Click to expand...

This is a nice idea. There are many big EDM related groups on facebook (eg. EDM Bedroom Producers). I had already planned to do some promo there by hand but if I see good results I will definitely consider getting Facedominator. I have already some expirience with PinDominator.

anrysouza said:

Another way to earn money by placing songs on YouTube is offering download link, CPA as ADFLY, so the more download more money

Click to expand...

I personally hate adfly. I find it totally annoying and I dont want to risk the favor of my subscribers for five bucks. There are better ways to monetize without making all fans hate you, but I will focus on that topic later, growing the channel has the highest priority at the beginning.
Thanks for your advice, though.

LoftPower said:

Much success on this is wished for you. Good luck.

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Thanks alot!

Tomorrow, I will describe which social networks I am going to use for this project!
(Was actually going to post today, but I felt like I should rewrite it a bit)
Stay tuned!

nnahlee said:

looks interesting good luck

Click to expand...

Thanks mate!

->


Setting up the social media accounts


I have now set up all social media accounts. I have signed up, added a profile image, a short description of our project & a link to our YouTube channel and followed 5-10 famous accounts in the EDM niche.
Here is which social networks I choosed and why:


FACEBOOK
When it comes to drive traffic to a YouTube video, Facebook works best - at least from my expirience. On the downside it's probably the hardest social network to grow.


TWITTER
Twitter is a good traffic source. Not as good as facebook, but therefor it's easier to grow, you get some impressions just by using #hashtags and there is a higher chance for your content to go viral (Twitter users are retweeting far more often than Facebook users share a post). Unfortunately twitter has a relative high average age, but for the EDM niche there are still enough people to make it worth being active there.


INSTAGRAM
I personally don't think that Instagram is a good way to promote videos. From my expirience, Facebook and twitter definitely outperform instagram when it comes to sending traffic to videos. Most likely because most users browse instagram on the go and don't want to wast their mobile data However, I found IG easy to grow (unlike twitter it's very young people dominated) plus you can build a great relationship with your followers. I want them to love my "brand", that's why I'm going to be very active on Instagram.


PINTEREST
Pinterest is a pretty cool social network but the demographics don't really fit my target audience. I will use it anyway because there is some nice content for my niche (like music quotes) on there.


SOUNDCLOUD
Soundcloud is essential to get in touch with producers, small labels and other channel owners. I will repost some tracks there and use it to make new friends in the scene, but I won't use it to drive traffic to my YouTube channel.


TUMBLR
I know many people love Tumblr, but to be honest, I never get to like it. I will get a tumblr account for my project but I am not going to be active there.


VINE
I somehow like VINE as a social network, however I will not put much effort into it.
I will only grow the vine account actively until it reaches around 1k followers (it might get me a lucky viral vine maybe) but then stop, because I don't think it's a good traffic source.


OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS (optional)
Here are some networks where I created an account but I don't plan to be active on:
Reddit, Google+, Mixcloud, Blogger, Wordpress, Weebly

Good luck! Subscribe.