The one site you HAVE to be on as an independent musician

Clickbait spoiler: it’s YouTube. Shocked? Knew that? Well here’s why.

YouTube’s position in music

YouTube is (and has been for a decade now) the “largest online streaming music source.” Over half a BILLION people regularly listen to music videos on YouTube. (There are 1.3 billion YouTube users, 39% of which listen to music on the service.) The next highest music streaming service is Spotify, which has only 1/5th of that audience, 100 million listeners as of October 2016. Pandora has 78 million listeners, and Apple Music is way behind with only 17 million listeners. Everything else is way, way behind — so small they won’t fit on this chart below comparing listener audiences:

You know who’s really killing it with music, a company almost so obvious you wouldn’t even know it? YouTube. — WIRED Nov. 2015

And while Spotify and Apple Music are growing their userbases, YouTube is growing faster than all other music streaming platforms combined.

YouTube’s demographics are key music demographics

Music fans begin shaping their identity with music in their preteens and teens, and their taste “evolves quickly through age 25 before reaching ‘maturity’ in their mid-30s.” So the critical time to shape a generation of music lovers is during that period of their lives.

YouTube has the ear of that generation: 83% of 16–24 year-olds use YouTube as a music platform rather than a video platform. A report from Nielsen says, “more teens listen to music through YouTube than through any other source.”

YouTube has higher audio quality than other free streaming services

As an independent artist, you want people to hear the best version of your music when they are first exposed to it. Most people first hear new, undiscovered music on free sources such as YouTube, the ad-supported tiers of Spotify and Pandora, Soundcloud, or Bandcamp.

So if you do your job and get your music out there, listeners will most likely hear your song on a free online music service. The catch is, those free services are making your song sound like farts recorded with a tin can and string. Every free tier except YouTube streams songs at 128kbps MP3 which is muddy and introduces unpleasant artifacts and noise.

YouTube, on the other hand, streams audio at 126kbps AAC. Ok, so what does that mean? AAC and MP3 are different formats. “Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates.” In fact, even at much lower bit rates, AAC out-performs MP3. According to tests at Dolby Laboratories, “AAC files at 96 kbps sound better than MP3 files at 128 kbps”. So, 126 kbps AAC is a better-sounding audio format than 128 kbps MP3 by all measures.

If you’re like me, you’re pretty surprised to hear that YouTube has better audio than any of the free audio streaming sites. Granted, it’s not perfect and not as good as some paid services or downloads, but remember, people get exposed to new music with free services first. And you want to put your best foot forward in this regard.

I used to share Bandcamp links with people when I wanted them to hear my song. Now I share a YouTube video with a link to Bandcamp in the description.

But what if you don’t have a video?

Make a slideshow. Just set one or more images to your music with iMovie, Windows Live Movie Maker, or an online service like Animoto. It really doesn’t have to be complicated. YouTube users are used to seeing this, and many people just let the audio play in the background anyway.

If you don’t want to go through the effort of making a slideshow for every song and uploading them to YouTube I wholeheartedly recommend DistroKid. For $20 a year, you can upload UNLIMITED songs to ALL the major music sites, including YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and more. Besides distributing your song everywhere and letting you keep 100% of the royalties, DistroKid will make a sharp-looking single-photo slideshow video for you using your album cover. It’s what I use, and you can use my discount if you want (save a couple bucks) by clicking here.

You can see a good example of what it looks like from my pal Joey Hines:

I know some artists who are on every streaming music service and social media platform. And some are super freaked out by all of it. Some are just starting, trying different things, and haven’t yet had a ton of success. For those in the last two categories, at least get all your songs on YouTube. Sites like DistroKid make this super easy. And if you have any other questions about YouTube or online music strategy, hit me up in the comments.

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