Waveformless

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

An Interesting Way to (Maybe) Monetize Your Music

So, next week, my latest album "Bruise" will be released. These days, it's an inevitability that, provided you've got a following of some sort, your music will be uploaded to YouTube by fans. Speaking with my friend Paul the other day, he mentioned that he had uploaded a video related to his interest in motorcycles some time ago and it ended up getting over 200,000 hits. YouTube contacted him offering the possibility of monetizing his video clip via ads. He had already made over a hundred bucks this way, simply for allowing some overlay ads. He suggested this might be something worth looking into for my album, since fans would upload it eventually anyway. So, I decided to do so and uploaded the entire album to YouTube. Obviously, I still have to pass the threshold of views to be eligible for monetization, but I think this will be quite an interesting experiment and a good possible option to raise some beer money for musicians who have a decent following.

What I can tell you so far is that the reaction from my fans has been overwhelmingly positive, and has really boosted my pre-orders. Whether this experiment results in any revenue from plays remains to be seen, but with the changing landscape of the music industry, professional musicians need to find new options for generating income.