5 Ways Musicians Earn Revenue Via YouTube

When it comes to YouTube, artists are fortunate in that they have a variety of options at their disposal when it comes to monetizing content on the platform. In this piece we examine the five key ways in which artists can earn money from YouTube.

Guest post by Randi Zimmerman of the Symphonic Blog

With YouTube, you’ve got a lot of options when it comes to making money off of your videos. From ads to the various programs YouTube has in place, they make it relatively easy for anyone, independent or working with a distributor, to make it happen. In this post, we’re highlighting 5 ways to earn money from YouTube. Let’s get started…

5 Ways Musicians Earn Money on YouTube

YouTube Partner Program

As an independent artist, you can earn money with the YouTube Partner Program by using ads to generate revenue. If enrolled, you can sit back and focus on creating great music while the program matches ads with your channel and audience. With this, YouTube goes ahead and collects the money from those advertisers and sends it over to your account. Easy peasy.

Note: In order to be eligible to apply to the YouTube Partner Program, a channel must have 1,000 subscribers and received 4,000 watch hours in the previous 12 months.

YouTube’s Content ID

YouTube’s Content ID is a digital fingerprinting system that content creators (like record labels and artists) can use to easily identify and manage their copyrighted content on YouTube.

As a Symphonic client, you can upload your music to us and we’ll go ahead and upload it to YouTube’s Content ID system for you. Once we do that, any song that is uploaded gets compared against audio and video files that’ve been uploaded by many users all over the world.

If a match is found, we’d monetize that video that has been matched and claimed to get you more royalties and ensure that your hard work isn’t being illegally shared and monetized by anyone else. Because the last thing you want is someone stealing your hard earned money by taking credit for YOUR work.

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Learn more…

Does Your Music Qualify for YouTube’s Content ID?

How to Prepare for Video Distribution

How to Promote Your Music Video in 7 Easy Steps

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YouTube Premieres

YouTube Premieres are a mix between traditional YouTube videos and a live stream. Like a regular YouTube video, you pre-record your video. Then, similarly to a live stream, you play the recording live with a live chat and live donations.

While your video is premiering, viewers can chat with other viewers just like a typical live stream. Not only can the viewers chat among themselves, you can hop in and interact with the chat while the video is live, too.

And remember that live donation feature? With YouTube Premieres, your fans can send in donations while they watch your Premiere. This opens up a whole new avenue of revenue for creators on YouTube to make even more money from their content. Especially now, while everyone is on lockdown due to the Coronavirus, this feature is the perfect option to help you out in these difficult times.

Check out, “How to Execute the Perfect YouTube Premiere” to increase your chances of success, in turn, increasing the possible revenue you stand to make with this feature.

YouTube Channel Management

With Symphonic’s Channel Management option, we can monetize ALL your channel’s content, not just your audio tracks. That means you can make money off of behind-the-scenes footage, vlogs, etc., giving you more freedom to create and less worry about getting proper compensation for it.

Already a distribution client? Apply for Channel Management here.

YouTube Cards

Cards are versatile pop-up screens you can add to your videos to sell tickets and merch, link to pre-release songs and even to other videos. Enabling cards will help push your audience towards places to buy tickets, links to playlists and other videos they might like, or directly to your merch store.

In Conclusion…

While you’re busy writing lyrics, making beats or promoting your next creative venture, tools like these are here to help you make the most of your efforts. We hope this post shed some light on some new ways to gain more revenue, so you can keep doing what you love.