Get more views on YouTube by submitting to YouTube music channels

Getting your music video on a YouTube music promotion channel is one way to promote your own YouTube music channel

As I’m sure you know, YouTube is a powerful marketing tool. It gives musicians a great platform to get your face and music seen and heard, and it’s pretty easy to use. But while easy to get started with, there are powerful and more advanced strategies you can use to further your reach and get your music videos in front of a new and targeted audience.

One of these strategies: use established YouTube channels to showcase your videos to a larger audience.

The benefits of uploading your music videos to a YouTube music channel
I’m guessing some of you might be confused as to why I’m recommending you upload your videos to someone else’s channel. Shouldn’t you be building up your own YouTube music channel?

While you’ll want to build up your own channel, uploading to other channels can gain you a lot of new fans. There are established channels that cater to your target audience who have a LOT more subscribers than you. How many do you have? 20? 100? 500? Some of these channels which you can upload videos to will have tens or hundreds of thousands of subscribers. If you upload your music video on a popular channel, you stand to gain a whole new set of fans.

Some examples of channels you can get your music on include:

Trap And Bass. As the name suggests, this channel caters to fans of trap and bass music. At the time of writing this, it has over 320,000 subscribers.

GRM Daily. Grime Daily Media is a channel catering to fans of UK grime music, with nearly 62,000 subscribers.

There are hundreds more of these channels online, covering every genre you can think of. Have a look around to find some in yours.

Getting your music video on a YouTube music promotion channel
So how do you go about getting your videos on these channels? It’s not as hard as you may think.

The first thing you need to take note of is the kind of channels that accept video submissions from talented musicians such as yourself. You can’t simply approach a channel such as MTV or a top music channel in your genre and expect them to upload your video for their subscribers. Most likely, they won’t even respond to your request.

What you have to do instead is seek out the channels that specialize in your kind of video and music — the channels that already have songs and videos from acts in your genre, and those that are on the lookout for new songs to showcase and promote.

It’s important to note that many of these channels are run by people who are first and foremost fans of the music. Some of them may make music or run events, but a lot of them don’t. They’re simply people who want to get involved in the industry and found YouTube was a good platform for them to go about doing that.

You may already know some of these channels, being in the industry yourself. Think of those channels that showcase a lot of the acts in your circles, and investigate to see if there’s a way to submit your music video. You should also start browsing around and searching for other artists in your niche. You’ll find that some have their videos on multiple channels. Check out those channels, and see if there are any you can get on, too.

Once you have a few channels in hand, the next step it to get in contact with them. Some of them will tell you their preferred means of contact, others you can email or connect with via their social media sites.

An important tip: If you submit your music and don’t hear back after a week, message them again via one of their social sites. Keep trying a different method until you’ve tried each way once. A polite message on another platform can jog their memory, and increase the chances you’ll get a reply.

If they don’t reply after that, they probably aren’t interested in what you’re offering. It would be nice to get a response to your message with a yes or no, but that’s not always possible, and some people genuinely don’t have the time to reply to everyone.

That’s ok though. Not only can you submit your music elsewhere, but as you release something in future, feel free to submit it to that channel again. Your last song may not have been right for them, but your new one might.

While targeting aggregators to promote your videos is a potential win for you, as a best practice, I’d recommend you put a majority of your videos on your own YouTube channel as you want a hub to send these new fans to if they end up liking what they see. If they do, chances are they’ll search your name to see what other songs you have. You want to be there with your own channel when they do, and encourage them to click that subscribe button.

This post was written by Shaun Letang of Music Industry How To. If you want more advice for forwarding your music career, you’ll probably want to start with his free music promotion ebook.

Image via ShutterStock.com.

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