YouTube has always been one of the best platforms when it comes to giving you data on your content. Now the company is doubling down on helping artists with some new YouTube Analytics For Artists features.
YouTube revamped their backend and analytics dashboard with YouTube Studio last year. After months and months of development, YouTube Studio now feels like a much more intuitive way to upload content and track its performance. But when it comes to music, there were still some important features music.
Musicians typically have a slightly different experience with YouTube. For starters, the vast majority of content on an artist's channel is well, usually music. That means that there are often multiple videos around the same piece of content (official music videos, lyric videos, static videos, user-generated videos etc.).
YouTube is now looking to help artists solve some of the issues around understanding their content's performance by rolling out a new section of analytics for every "Official Artist Channel" (OAC) on YouTube. If you don't know what an OAC is, it's basically how YouTube makes sure all of the videos uploaded on your behalf are in the same place.
So this means if you have a VEVO channel as well as your channel as well as "Topic" playlists, they all appear under your OAC. Your OAC also collects all of your subscribers so they're not spread about. In most cases, your distributor can hook you up with an OAC approval.
The new YouTube Analytics for Artists is promising to help show things like where your songs appear in user-generated content and increased insight into your fans. They're introducing a "Total Reach" statistic that shows who your music is reaching not just based on videos that you upload, but based on third party videos that include your songs. One majorly common use: unofficial lyric videos that other users upload.
This feature helps artists get a more clear picture of who is actually hearing their music (since oftentimes a song might gain traction on an "unofficial" platform or video). For context, YouTube says the top 1,000 artists on YouTube get at least 20% of their "chart eligible" music listens from videos that other users upload with their music in them.
YouTube Analytics For Artists is also introducing a new "Song Detail" feature that aims to show additional engagement with songs on the YouTube platform. When we know more about the best ways to read and understand these pieces of information, we'll add a new post.
Official Artist Channels should start to see the new analytics in their YouTube Studio in the upcoming days.
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