a website vs a YouTube channel

B

beginner-HRF

New member
Hi

(in order to showcase & sell my songs)

my own website vs my own YouTube channel.

Differences??

in advance, thank you very much for your kind help

Christian
​
 
Your website is the equivalent of a piece of rock floating about in the entire universe. It's there. We may know that. But does anybody care or have any interest? And then how the hell can we find it?

YouTube is similar except YouTube is the shop window crammed with millions of all sorts on display for people.

Your fantastic song needs a video or eye catching picture for it to stand out in the shop window. So on YouTube it needs what they call now 'clickbait', which is an eye catching thumbnail.

Without the thumbnail nobody will look at your video or hear your song.............without doing that, they will never bother to go to your website to find out what else you do.

The skill is getting potential listeners to click on your YouTube video. The days are gone when you could use half naked women.

Websites are cheap today. YouTube at present is free.

There are other associated ways, but then it gets complicated and costs money.
 
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At 'your own website', you can have as much/little as you want. A biography; discography; a 'store' to sell products; photos; videos (embedded or hosted at youtube). Youtube is just a place to store videos.
 
mjbphotos said:
At 'your own website', you can have as much/little as you want. A biography; discography; a 'store' to sell products; photos; videos (embedded or hosted at youtube). Youtube is just a place to store videos.
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I have disagree with you there Mike. YouTube is the best 'free' platform/billboard/shop window you will ever get.
 
Papanate said:
You should do both - and have a TikTok channel - A Twitter account and many other social network accounts. IT's not an either/or situation.
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I think this is an important point that a lot of musicians miss (my band included). If you want to promote via social media, you really need to promote on ALL the major platforms. It's painfully tedious to do on your own, though. There are freelance social media "managers" out there who will handle all of that for you, but I'm unsure what that kind of thing costs.

YouTube is great, but you need to get your channel in front of people, which doesn't happen organically unless you go viral, and that happens on other platforms.
 
Orson said:
I have disagree with you there Mike. YouTube is the best 'free' platform/billboard/shop window you will ever get.
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How so? If it's monetized, there are pop-up ads that you cannot disable. You can't post anything but videos, you can't customize the way the page appears. Even Reverbnation offers more features (for free - don't pay for their offers!), gig listings, photos, hosted music, video links to your youtube videos, etc.
 
mjbphotos said:
How so? If it's monetized, there are pop-up ads that you cannot disable. You can't post anything but videos, you can't customize the way the page appears. Even Reverbnation offers more features (for free - don't pay for their offers!), gig listings, photos, hosted music, video links to your youtube videos, etc.
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Because if you wanted a shop where would you want it? Nice street or outside the tube/train station where the millions pass by?
 
mjbphotos said:
How so? If it's monetized, there are pop-up ads that you cannot disable. You can't post anything but videos, you can't customize the way the page appears. Even Reverbnation offers more features (for free - don't pay for their offers!), gig listings, photos, hosted music, video links to your youtube videos, etc.
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You can absolutely post music, you just put your band's logo on a fixed "video". YouTube also has a music subscription service that competes with Spotify (YouTube Music), and millions of people have subscriptions to YouTube, which eliminates the ads.

As YouTube's subscription model evolves into a legit ecosystem (it's basically already there except for original content production), you're going to have a ton of integration opportunities. People are starting to use YouTube the way they use Hulu and Netflix.
 
IMHO, it's hard to recover the investment in a personal website these days I'd think, at least on the scale it sounds like you're talking about. Website "discovery" is a problem anymore, and you have to have the "search engine optimization" thing working, and, frankly, that's a game that will suck time and money, too.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (still? really?) Insta, TikTok, are all useful for promotion. Do you need all of them? Probably depends on your target audience/demographics. But monetizing those is hard to do. Maybe that's what you want to do, but keeping the the gnat-like attention span of users on those platforms requires constant content generation - you need a following in the millions - and my view is it looks like a full-time job.

If you want to sell individual songs and albums via digital downloads, I would think something like BandCamp is a better platform. You can even sell merch on some of those platforms. Add distribution to Spotify and other streamers (again, exposure/promotion places you'll want to be on) using Distrokid or whatever, I suppose - don't really know the ins and outs and best options of that side these days.

Good luck.
 
I think you should do both, but I'm definitely a YouTube fan. You just need to learn the YouTube game to reach your audience. But if you do, the potential to reach new interested people is helped by the YouTube algorithm.

Good luck!
 
I'd say do both! YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok are all free to run an account on. With no cost of entry other than your time and energy, it's probably worth posting on any or all of them. Use them to drive traffic to your website, and vice versa. It's a whole ecosystem.

The benefit to a website is that it can survive adverse events that might happen on the various social media outlets. YouTube's occasional "ad-pocalypses" and beyond-broken automated copyright enforcement could take you off of that platform, Twitch's awful copyright and rights system might backfire, or maybe one day Facebook decides that your material is somehow offensive, or some other platform goes away or changes its direction...any of those can close down an entire revenue stream.

Your website will be immune to all of those other factors that are out of your control. It's a nice home base, and one that you can curate and cater to show visitors exactly what you want to show them, rather than having them randomly stumble across that one cringe-y video that you made 12 years ago as a first impression. You can put together a "portfolio" of sorts, curate it so that it reflects the material that you're most proud of, and present that as what visitors first see when they visit. Plus it provides a home base to show and/or sell things like hi-fi audio files, entire albums, cover art, lyrics, merch, etc.
 
keith.rogers said:
IMHO, it's hard to recover the investment in a personal website these days I'd think, at least on the scale it sounds like you're talking about. Website "discovery" is a problem anymore, and you have to have the "search engine optimization" thing working, and, frankly, that's a game that will suck time and money, too.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter (still? really?) Insta, TikTok, are all useful for promotion. Do you need all of them? Probably depends on your target audience/demographics. But monetizing those is hard to do. Maybe that's what you want to do, but keeping the the gnat-like attention span of users on those platforms requires constant content generation - you need a following in the millions - and my view is it looks like a full-time job.

If you want to sell individual songs and albums via digital downloads, I would think something like BandCamp is a better platform. You can even sell merch on some of those platforms. Add distribution to Spotify and other streamers (again, exposure/promotion places you'll want to be on) using Distrokid or whatever, I suppose - don't really know the ins and outs and best options of that side these days.

Good luck.
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The "game" with YouTube is the constant content generation, 100%. There's a reason why the rich kids can put together a channel with 1M subscribers so quickly: they have the luxury of treating content generation like a full time job, and they realize that the content they're generating doesn't need to be high quality, there just has to be a LOT of it to feed the algorithm. That's why you see so much absolute tripe, they're putting up 15-20 minute videos of themselves sitting their cars, talking about why blue is their favorite color and reviewing fast food cheeseburgers. They know that nobody is going to watch that stuff at first.

Also, paying someone with a subscriber bot doesn't hurt, either lol.
 
I think you guys missed my point - youtube is fine for posting videos, but that's all you can do there. So let YT host the videos that you embed on YOUR website. Hosting a website does not have to be particularly expensive if you don't need a lot of file storage space, but you can always use a place like reverbnation (for free) - they will host your music - for free, with no limitations, and even will let you add links on where to buy the music (use a free bandcamp site for that ). You can link all or some of your youtubes, list your gigs.... A personal website will give you more options - the appearance, a blog link, an EPK, etc.
If you just want a place for people to play your music, sure you can just put it on a video with a still picture (or create an actual video, its not hard). The only way to get more views on it is to promote promote promote create create create promote promote promote. A website is to establish a personal presence - a place to point people to if you are looking for gigs or selling product.
 
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beginner-HRF said:
Hi

(in order to showcase & sell my songs)

my own website vs my own YouTube channel.

Differences??

in advance, thank you very much for your kind help

Christian
​
Click to expand...
The main differences:

YouTube: You have no control over the platform and I don't believe there is a way to accept payments through it as of yet.
Website: You're in control of everything: Functionality, email list, payment processor, design, etc.

If you want to showcase your music, I think both will work, YouTube is great for that and integrates well with a lot of sites and other social media apps.
Selling your music, I'd suggest doing this via a website.
 
Both good places to promote yourself or whatever your trying to promote. Social media is a multi pronged tool with many branches to grow your tree of existence / influence in cyberland. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, iTunes, Amazon and 10's of thousands of other places to do your thing. Websites cost a lot more time, effort and money to host. The return on that investment is something you individually need to assess to see if it merits that investment. I have a website for my business that I put a lot of time and money into but quit bothering with updating it. I keep it up and use the domain name for business e-mails as it gives my at home business some credibility but other than that it's just taking up some cyberspace that cost me @$100 a year to keep up. Just to have it for credibility is worth the $100. For my music I use Facebook, Youtube a few other music sites and Distrokid and all that gets me maybe 50K streams a year combined and a few cents in revenue...I'm on soundcloud and soundclick but most of my streams are on audiomack for some reason.
 
I recommend both. A direct website isn't going to initially get the exposure and traffic that you can get on YT. There are effective strategies to stroking the YT algorithms to get your content to show up more in search results. Now, you can do the same thing with a website, but you're going to have a difficult time getting priority in google searches until you have a lot of traffic. You can use YT to generate traffic to your website. Most people put links in the description of songs or instrumentals where the viewer can be redirected to purchase a lease for them. IMO, it only makes sense to do both.
 
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