Why YouTube?

As my production is a music video, it is my aim to present it in the most visually appealing way possible to help the distribution of the product to increase sales of the bands produce. This is the case with all real music videos; the band wants them to look good as to push them into the public eye and visual information is the easiest to consume in this modern age, with the introduction of music channels and internet streaming. As a species that thrives on visual stimulation, we are attracted to songs that have videos that appeal to us and conform to the conventions of the genre we are interested in.

Professionally created music videos for huge artists such as Linkin Park, Rhianna and Lady Gaga are usually introduced straight onto the music channels as to reach a hugely expansive wide audience. However in todays fast food culture, the internet is becoming the main way of artists releasing their media to be consumed by their target audience. The new way to capture the audience is through the phenomenal revolution that is YouTube. Music videos began on this webpage by underground artists who had created their own videos to create visually appealing art to accompany their latest track, and in this technique; many artists became famous and example of this being Lily Allen. In affect this paved the way for bigger and bigger artists throwing their videos onto YouTube. It takes about an hour to upload a video and about another hour to have thousands of guaranteed album sales.

The target audiences will obviously be affected on what genre the music is, but in this day and age with the way we consume media, the lines between these are becoming thinner. A music video released on a specified genre channel such as ‘Scuzz’ or ‘Magic’ will now have a much more narrowed audience as they are only appealing to their target audience. Although this in itself will get you hundreds of thousands of sales in that genre, YouTube allows your video to progress to new heights of distribution. Every type of music lover can see your video and maybe warm to a track, increasing sales more rapidly in cross genre consuming. You only have to look at hits on music videos and their comments on YouTube , to see how much potential sales can be made. One example being Linkin Park’s song ‘New Divide’ which has had over 30,000,000 hits since June this year, the song ended up as number one in the US.

So why YouTube? The facts are all too obvious. The better your options of distribution and the more audience you can reach equals better sales. YouTube has over 100,000,000 hits a day with more than 25% of the world logging on, the possibilities of a music video being viewed, and the possible sales to over the quarter of the population must be intriguing to all artists. This ties in closely with the 'Uses and Gratifications Theory'. This theory follows a basic model. It is an audience-centered approach to the media. When an audience actively seeks out media, they are basically searching for it in order to "gratify" a need. By seeking out the media, a person fulfills a need to be informed, the desire for infomation albeit text, pictures or video. YouTube satisfys peoples needs, visual infomation on demand.