We’re always focused on huge numbers. Whether you jump back to the era of worldwide multi-platinum hits, stop to ponder all that time you invested getting friends on MySpace, how holy the Like was a couple of years ago, or the current rush to get followers on Instagram, there’s always a huge focus on numbers.
However, akin to how a Facebook Like is a deceptive measure of one’s popularity, it’s important which number you focus on. On Facebook, the more important number is essentially how many people are talking about your page. Similarly, on YouTube, the views aren’t the most important number either; that honour goes to stats such as Average Percentage Viewed and Average View Duration. These stats embody that often-amorphous term “engagement.”
Viewer engagement is the key area which affects recommendations on YouTube and has a significant impact on your search ranking. How can you take advantage of this? One of the best ways is to “program the session.” This set of tactics helps you reach the strategic goal of gaining more engaged viewers and thence to growing your overall audience.
The first tactic in this group is to never link to a video watch page when promoting a video if you can help it. Always link to that video in a playlist. This keeps your primary goal intact — watch my important video — while helping along your greater goal of more viewer engagement. Playlists can be based on anything. If you’re a label, you might naturally playlist other videos from that artist. Or you may choose to playlist videos from similar artists (even those not your own). Really the goal here is to think about who will be watching the initial video and think about what they might wish to watch next. Even programming videos that don’t belong to you helps your engagement metrics.
Of course viewers are not always coming to videos at your direction. In fact, most videos on YouTube are still found via search, sharing, and recommendations. How do you program those sessions? Again, think about how people might be getting to your video. One way you can figure this out is to look in your video’s analytics and see where your viewers are coming from. If you find out a lot of them came from a link from a popular blog, for instance, on which you had another video featured, you could add an annotation linking to that other video. It’s likely viewers coming from there have seen or will be interested in it too. Of course, after they’ve watched that, you need to figure out what they might be interested in watching next!
Apart from these broad tactics, it’s also possible to use the new Welcome Video feature on YouTube’s One Channel to program the session. These videos are prime real estate to introduce viewers to your channel. Be it a mission statement, a list of artists, or more of a commercial spot, this video should show potential viewers what you’re about and what they can expect to find on your channel. This is also a great opportunity to drive them to that other content. Point out key playlists, artists, or videos and link through to them with annotations. Of course, don’t forget that the key goal of the Welcome Video is to get users to subscribe!
Another feature of the One Channel Welcome Video section is that once subscribed, a viewer will get personalized recommendations of what to watch next on your channel. You have some, though not a lot, of control over this experience and part of that control is an effort to… program the session! YouTube has engineered this section to take advantage of video metadata combined with the viewer’s habits watching your channel. For instance, this works great with episodic content. If a video is obviously part four of a series and a viewer watches it, the next time they come to your channel they will likely be suggested part five of that series. One way to translate this to music videos is to number them in chronological order in some area of the metadata (most likely the tags). If Artist X has 12 videos and you’ve tagged those as “video 1, video 2″ and so on, it’s likely that if they watch one in the series, the next will be recommended.
There are heaps more tactics and ways to think about increasing a viewer’s watch time, of which programming the session is merely one. My hope is that this broad overview with a specific example will help you discover your own effective tactics. If you have any to share, please do so in comments!
As a new Android owner, I quickly discovered a new music application called Songza that seemed to stand out. Songza is a free music streaming and recommendation service that first launched in 2007. What makes this app unique is its “concierge” feature, i.e. the music it recommends depending on your mood (sleepy, party, concentrating, wake up, etc.) and activities during the day (commuting, working out, in the office, etc).
Songza not only has a collection of genres, artists and songs like other music apps but it also offers playlists based on era, interests and themes such as “Fashion Week,” “80′s New Wave Party” or “Songs Featured in Apple Commercials…” Cool, right?
So cool that Songza is now one of the most popular music apps our there. It saw over 1.15 million downloads in 2012 with an increase of up to 112,000 daily active users. Ever since the app launched last June, it has been listed among the Top Free Apps on iTunes for the iPad as well as the iPhone, and it’s not stopping at that. Songza plans to integrate deeper with Facebook users as well as offer compatibility with other wireless players and streaming devices.
I personally like the wide variety of music Songza offers while still being very specific with playlists. I can pick and choose the songs I likes but also the style/mood I’m in at a specific point in time. Maybe I’m “brooding,” “angsty,” or “visceral” or I’m doing a particular kind of activity, like a “shopping at a vintage store,” “reading in a coffee shop” and of course, hosting an “ultimate retro party.”
Go try it out! You can download the app in your app store or visit their website to find out what they’re cooking for how you feel right now!
As the Paralympics enter their final week, the whole London 2012 team can be congratulated for many things: excellent venues, great game makers (the army of volunteers), fabulous venues and amazing atmospheres. One thing that they might not be applauded for by many was the amazing variety of music that both games have utilised.
Having been lucky enough to attend both the Football and Boxing in the Olympics and the Athletics in the Paralympics, I was blown away by how great the use of incidental music was. Watching on the TV, you saw snippets of tracks being used between natural pauses in all sorts of games. In Hockey for example, artists such as New Order, Blur, Kasabian, The Sex Pistols and The Clash were played whenever goals were scored. Even walking to and from the venues, music was everywhere. Be it from piped public address systems or (in the case of the Olympic park itself) a plethora of live musicians performing their own original music to eager crowds.
The Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Olympics were a smorgasbord of British talent from the past 50 years with live performances from The Who, Paul McCartney, Kasabian, Spice Girls, Beady Eye (Liam Gallagher), Mike Oldfield and even The London Symphony Orchestra. It was an excellent mix of the new and old with something for everyone, and given the high speed of the show if you didn’t like one track chances were it was quickly replaced by one you did. There was real mixture of genres with Rock, Alternative, Grime, Classical and Dance music all seamlessly rolling into one. The comedic element of Eric Idle performing “Always Look on the Bright Side Of Life” in the Closing Ceremony fit excellently into what had been quite a fun two weeks. Even the choice of using Vangelis “Chariots Of Fire” for the medal ceremonies added an uniquely British touch to the proceedings.
I must admit I’ve never been a big fan of radio for music. I love radio for talks and news, but not for music. I like many different genres in music and most of the time the choice of what I want to listen to comes from my mood. For instance, I will not want to listen to the same kind of music whether it’s rainy or sunny, whether I feel happy or melancholic, whether I’m alone or with friends… I love to discover new bands but I also love listening to old hits that take me back. I also love to discover old unknown bands and songs, and realize that I have loved a song for years but never known who sang it…
For all these reasons, radio is a very imperfect medium since you have to choose and limit yourself to one genre — not to mention that there are many genres which are not broadcast. Radio is also imperfect because it’s a form of mass media, a medium which conducts surveys to make sure it broadcasts songs that appeal to “most” listeners, to the people who tune-in and don’t change the station.
So, what’s a better replacement?
If you think about it, music is likely one of the most intimate and shareable cultural goods. You will always remember the song you love to listen to with your girlfriend, the music you were listening to with your friends in high school and college, the music your parents were playing on a Sunday afternoon, the songs your friends made you discover… A few years ago, I used to go to clubs quite often to check out DJs, and the one I was crazy about at the time was a French DJ by the name of Laurent Garnier. This guy used to DJ all night long from 11PM to 7AM, playing techno, house, new wave but also soul or rock in the same party. What I loved about him was that he was building a story with the music between himself and the dancers, and one unique story each night. He was the perfect guide for a great and new journey, every night.
All this brings me to… playlists, and why I love them! You can find playlists by keywords for moods, genre, artists and influences, periods, specific moments of the year (Christmas, Summer…), and of your life (birth, meetings, getaways, weddings…). You can create collaborative playlists with your friends to share all the music you love, or you can create your own playlists and share them with your friends, or even strangers on the other side of the world.
Another important part of the playlist universe are the curators, the grandmasters of the playlist community. Everyone can create a Top 40 Best Single Sales, and to be frank, you don’t need a playlist for that; you can just turn on a commercial radio station. Curators however are the guys (and girls) whose ultimate goal is to bring you the most surprising and consistent music around cities, movies, covers, samples… or anything your imagination can cook up. These curators, like the French DJ I mentioned above, know how to create a perfect musical journey. And, as for a traditional trip I might plan, I’d tend to trust a Portuguese fellow the most for Fado or a Brazilian one for a Samba. (Expertise has its benefits.)
Thanks to playlists, you don’t need to have an encyclopedic knowledge of music anymore, or spend hours and money trying to find what you love. Just search, listen, and open your ears!
And, if you’re a playlist fan too, take some time to become a curator yoursekf, making thousands of people happy sharing what you know. Now, let’s turn off the radio for a second, and begin to rediscover music…
Beyond putting your music on Spotify, as a label or artist, you must create your own strategy within the service in order to increase listening of your music and maximize your earnings. In Spain, as we have witnessed through the various Spotify campaigns we have run, there is a key: playlists!
What we have seen so far is that campaigns that focus on directing traffic to a new release achieve high stream rates while the campaign is running. But once the campaign is over, the rates return to regular levels.
So how do we maintain high traffic rates post-campaign? We make the fans subscribe to your playlist or include your music in their favorite playlists! This is the direction we have been taking in our latest Spotify campaigns.
If you are a label and you want to promote your entire catalogue, we recommend you create a Spotify profile, customize it, fill it with new playlists — choosing tracks as your artists would choose a setlist for a show — and once done, promote and circulate the profile and playlist through your channels and social networks. A spot-on track selection for Valentine’s Day for instance can provide you some romantic listening for more than just one night! If that playlist helped save a date for me, I would be a forever loyal subscriber!
Or, if you are an artist and you want to promote a new release, give a little something extra to the fan: not just a bonus track, but something that really engages them; something special that makes them know your music in a different way. For example, choose your best collaborator, somebody well-known, related and ready to give you a hand, and ask him or her to make a personal selection of the best tracks from all your releases. Put these tracks in a playlist and you will be ready to offer your fans something really special!
As we say in Spain “imaginación al poder” — empower imagination!
