A discussion was going on the SAMW(WUMB Summer Acoustic Music Week) list serve on an article in the Boston Globe on the shrinking venues, coffee houses, etc. for independent and folk singers to play at because of the BMI, ASCAP and others efforts to demand performance license fees. Very few of these places can afford these fees and are just closing their doors, and cutting off places to get exposure and play music.
Here is the article http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2010/06/09/pay_to_play/
It just got me started thinking about all the new ways that we can promote ourselves these days and this was my response.
This is all the more reason to start recording your own songs on video and put them on YouTube, make sure you put your copyright info in the description or YouTube will assume you took it from someone else and pull your account (this happen to me with AcousticMusicTV, I had to tell them they were all original songs and I had signed releases, they put the account back up), and blast them out to the world. You will have a global audience, put links back to your website or CDbaby or ITunes and don't worry about the shrinking venues, who cares, it is a global world. Play to the world.
It is easy to do, stand in a room with decent light, turn on the camera and play your music. Almost any camera will work, just make it clear and the sound decent. Most of the mikes on most of the cameras will do fine if the room isn't to big. You will only get better and as you learn you will get better equipment, but you can start with that camera in your pocket. If you have a Mac, you have iMovie, if you have a PC you have MovieMaker, they come included, they work great for just taking the footage from your camera, a little editing (cutting off the front and back where we see you pushing the button), drop in a title, your web address along the bottom a couple of times and a call to action at the end. "Visit our site ####, buy our songs at CDBaby, to see more of our music" You can also annotate the videos and link them together right in YouTube with messages like, "see our other songs"
3 Tips on How to Make Your Videos Get Noticed
Most people who put up videos don't do any of the things below, if you tag and label and put in descriptions and or lyrics it is very easy to rank very high if not #1 in YouTube on your subject matter. Also if you have 2 videos on YouTube you are 51xTimes more likely to be found in Google Organic Search. Remember Google owns YouTube, they love em. By March of 2011 YouTube Video Search will be passing Google Search for the most searches, and this is all about text. YouTube is currently 25% of all traffic on the web, and it is GLOBAL, within the next couple of years it is forcasted to be 90% of all traffic. And 25% of all web video traffic are music videos. YouTube is built for music. You can sing to the entire world for free.
Ok you have finished your video and you have it loaded up on YouTube or some of the other video hosting platform. Will anyone see it? Well usually no, so what can we do to help it along. There are a lot of very easy steps that most people just never do.
1. The most important part of any video is the title. Google indexes all the text around videos with the title being the number one. Titles should be descriptive, and key worded along with your web address right in the title at the end. The title might be the only thing that attracts a viewer, is yours attracting. Make the song titles descriptive
2. Your video description, located on the right or now below is vital for attracting Google and educating your viewer with information and resources or lyrics. The first part of the description should be your web site address starting with http:// . . . ., this is a live link to your site. Then fill in with a description of the song or whatever the video is about along with contact information, phone number and links. YouTube lets you put in a ton of text, how about typing in the lyrics of your song right into the description. Other video hosting platforms allow for short descriptions but YouTube lets you write a book.
3. Your Tags, vital, vital, vital, can't say this enough. This area contains the key words that viewers will be putting into Google and other search engines. If you don't fill it in viewers will have a much harder time finding your videos. Use Google External Keyword Tool to figure out what to put, the sweet spot words that get 100 to 300 searches a day. Another great tip is to search on similar videos and see what the successful videos are using for their tags, copy or modify them for yours.
EXTRA TIPS
4. I know you will be doing songs with music but Google now does transcriptions of every video that gets loaded up, all videos are now closed captioned with subtitles. Just an idea, maybe do your songs acoustic with the music kind of low and the vocals up so that Google can transcribe them. if not then make sure the lyrics are in the description. In fact put in the chords along with the lyrics and see if you can get people to play your music.
5. Sneaky trick, search on your song subject matter in YouTube, see who comes up, look at their title, description and keyword/tags and copy them, you don't have to be word for word, but it gives you a real good idea of what videos come up first with what words, just duplicate it.
6. go to http://www.tubemogul.com/ sign up and blast your videos to 10, 20, 30 other video platforms, (it is FREE, and they are all GLOBAL)
7. Every time you put up a video, Facebook it, twitter it, blog it, Stumble it, DIGG it, etc. Submit it to ITunes for Podcasting.
8. If you don't want to be seen on video, how about using some pictures or your CD cover or the lyrics going by from a powerpoint presentation, PowerPoint has a make movie mode, just look under the File pull down menu, it creates a .MOV file, perfect for YouTube,
Ok that is enough for now, the point is it is super easy to get yourself out into the world using YouTube, remember there are 3 billion pcs out there with web access, that is 3 billion potential customers for your music, and mobil is 5.5 billion and a huge chunk of them are equipped with web ability. People love music, give them what they love.
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