The potential of YouTube playlist promotion:
Over the past few months, our team has repeatedly found that most musicians are unable to see the huge potential behind YouTube Playlist Promotion. We are sure that popular YouTube Playlists can provide just as valuable an impact on your music as popular Spotify Playlist Promotion.
Now, you might wonder how do we come up with this claim. After more than 5 years of expanding our Spotify Network, we wanted to find new ways for our music productions to reach more listeners and expand our web presence. And honestly, we were kind of shocked when we saw the initial results of our first YouTube Playlist experience. So, with this article, we want to give you some background information about YouTube Playlist Promotion and how they can help to grow your audience and raise awareness of your brand and to promote your music.
Important Facts About YouTube Playlist Promotion (what else you need to know):
YouTube as Streaming Music Platform:
Back in early 2018 Music Business Worldwide published an article about YouTube being the most dominant streaming platform in the global music business. Just during that year, YouTube overhauled its music streaming app, and it started exploding in popularity. According to Google, one billion visitors come to YouTube for music each month. And the music streaming app still has a lot more room left to grow.
If you are having trouble imagining that these claims are true, you can just go and ask some people around you how they listen to their favorite songs. Of course, other music streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, or SoundCloud will be mentioned. But globally, YouTube is the go-to spot for most people. And the reason for that is kind of simple. YouTube is like an all-in-one entertainment place, especially for younger listeners.
Furthermore, it is quite easy to understand there is a huge variety of content available for free, and you can connect with other users as well because essentially it is a social network or social media.
YouTube Video Promotion:
So obviously there is a huge audience out there that you can appeal to with your music. The problem is YouTube gets tons of material uploaded every second. To make their music stand out, many artists often produce a rather expensive music video. Do not get me wrong here, there is nothing wrong with that. But simply uploading the video and hoping to get the views in automatically only works in the fewest cases. Once your music video is uploaded, the actual work begins. Because one thing is for sure, to make your videos and channel more relevant on YouTube, you need to generate more views and watch-time.
On the one hand, you can promote your video with YouTube Ads to influence these factors, which certainly works well for some artists. However, popular YouTube playlists also offer a powerful alternative to promote your video content. YouTube playlists can feature any video on YouTube, even music videos with explicit content. So, let’s talk more specifically about this issue.
How do YouTube Playlists work?
The answer to that question is not too hard to understand, as YouTube Playlists work quite similarly compared to Spotify Playlists. But let’s start from the beginning.
There are extremely popular playlists on YouTube across all genres. For example, if you go to the start page of YouTube and just type in any music genre keyword into the search bar, you will see that YouTube features playlists among the first search result positions. You can imagine that these search result positions receive numerous impressions.
To convince yourself, feel free to type “Rock” into the YouTube search bar, and you will find a playlist called “My 80's & 90's Rock Playlist”. If you press on “View Full Playlist”, you'll be led to the “Playlist Page”. All included videos are located on the right side.
On the left side, you can see that the playlist has a total of +,-189 videos and that this playlist has received over 427 million views to date.
How Does YouTube Count the Playlist Views?
Any video that has played within the playlist counts as one view for the entire playlist. So, this means that the playlist will generate over +,-189 new views if a user takes the time to listen to the entire playlist from the first video to the last. The number of views is usually updated each 1–2 days. Please convince yourself and check out the views of a playlist that might be relevant to your music genre. It can sometimes seem crazy how many views certain playlists generate in one day. This particular Rock playlist receives around 50-60k playlist views each day. If you are wondering what exactly is that number of views supposed to tell you, and what does that mean regarding the different spots?.
Our experience over the past 3 years has shown that the first spot in a YouTube Playlist has received an average of 10% of the total views to date. The second spot usually gets about 5-7% and then the percentage decreases step by step with each additional spot. As a small general orientation: If you can get one of your videos to be ranked around spot 20 in a popular playlist, you can expect to receive about 1.5% of the incoming traffic.
The Top 20 places of the search results take almost all the Views
So, the higher your video is placed within a popular playlist, the more views you can expect. This is the same principle as with Spotify Playlists. And just like Spotify, there are different users on YouTube who have at some point created playlists that have grown over time for different reasons. In most cases, however, the SEO/main search result positions are the reason why the playlists receive millions or even billions of views.
Another tip worth mentioning is that if you are searching for YouTube playlists, press on the “Filter” button and select “Playlist” in the “Type” section. This way YouTube shows you only Playlists as search results. Similarly to Spotify, it is sometimes possible to contact the owner of the playlist and suggest your music to them. Sometimes it can be very exhausting to get in touch with those people, however, it can pay off.
7 Benefits of being featured in YouTube Playlists:
Let’s get a brief overview of all the benefits that YouTube Playlists Promotion entail:
1. Increase in Metrics
You will automatically make use of the playlist’s audience. So many people around the world will listen to your music. Therefore, the views of your video will increase in the first place. As mentioned earlier, this is a major influencing factor on YouTube's algorithms. Therefore, it is very likely that you will experience additional playlist placements, an increase in video suggestions, and YouTube searches. You will most likely gain an increase in Likes, Video Shares, and comments. Especially if people press like, you will be featured in "Mix-Playlists" generated by YouTube, appear on the browsers page, and gain more external and direct traffic overall. If people like your style, it’s also possible that they will subscribe to your channel and become more aware of your brand.
2. Brand Awareness
YouTube may register and connects your music with the best hits and the most famous artists in your genre in the future, as you will be in a playlist with them for a while.
3. Reduces Investment in Advertising
With the right playlist to match your style, you can target the right audience for your music genre without advertising.
4. It Can Increase Your Income
If you are enabled for the YouTube monetization, playlist views will count as regular views, and you'll keep 100% of the revenues. In the vast majority of cases, that doesn’t work with YouTube ads.
5. Worldwide Passive Promotion
Maybe you've experienced it yourself already: YouTube playlists run in different restaurants, bars, clubs, public places, and more. This provides another opportunity to receive passive promotion.
6. Explicit Organic Promotion
YouTube playlists are probably the only way to promote explicit content organically. This is not possible with YouTube Ads.
7. Audience Analytics
With the YouTube Studio analytics, you get a great overview of your audience, and you'll be able to notice how the viewers engage.
Conclusion:
With that being said, we hope you now have a better understanding of YouTube Playlists and the potential behind them. In general, we believe you want to get your music promoted as much as possible to draw more attention to your brand, no matter on which platform. As a musician nowadays, this is very important since there are so many people who are trying to break into this field.
We imagine that your YouTube presence can determine how successful you are going to be in the music industry, so make sure you always keep an eye on your YouTube analytics.
If you have any further questions on the subject or in general, please contact us at any time, and we will try to help you as best we can.
In case you need help with YouTube playlist promotion, feel free to check our Products here.