The risk of invisibility when refusing to list gear in YouTube video title

So who are the live, hardware-based techno/house/club music artists who are successful on YouTube who don’t put the names of the gear in their video titles.

…and how did they get to be successful? :thinking:

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I think the better question is - who are the “Youtube/Instagram famous” artists that people actually listen to? Because based off what I’ve seen there’s not many of them. Probably due to the fact that most don’t have a leg to stand on once you take the cute tabletops and shiny gear out of the equation.

Seriously - try closing your eyes and listening to some of these guys without the visual element sometime. It’s not great.

Happy new year!

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don’t forget the vintage toys and houseplants :joy: I’m guilty of this myself

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A darker or more dangerous question would be if you close your eyes to the gear, without the visual element, why doesn’t it sound so great.

The numbers suggest that out of all the videos, something should sound great, yet nothing ever rises to the top.

With exception to Ziv aka Loopop. His track “The trip starts here” is a banger and was made on either the Analog Rythm or the OT.

Edit. Here’s the song in question. I really love this track.

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I list my gear so people interested know what was used. I’m not trying to be famous. Just useful I guess :upside_down_face:

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Yeah, end of the day listing gear can help grab whatever initial clicks the algorhythm wants, Skinner Box made some great music, and often listed the gear used. Marc Rebillet is maybe an example of an artist trying to take full advantage of youtube as an artist (not techno/house/club) but gear is not the focus. Personally I think showing your face as you preform probably is the way to go if you don’t want a gear focus… youtube is a video platform after all so people need something to look at.

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I encourage everyone to put their gear in the titles. You want to be found by people and a lot of those folks are into similar gear you’re into. You’re already swimming upstream in a sea of content. Why make it harder?

Though discovery might start centered around gear, it doesn’t necessarily mean it ends with that.

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I always name and show the gear in my thumbnail as this is what attracts me to other people’s gear videos.

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Is Youtube even important to dance music producers? I would imagine that places like Beatport are far more important. :man_shrugging:

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I’ve definitely discovered a fair few tunes and artists I quite like and listen to a lot when I’ve been searching for videos about gear. So yeah, put it in the titles for sure, why not.

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From what I understand, it goes beyond the title, or gear being listed. You also have to have a cheesy/attention grabbing thumbnail. You have to release on a predictable schedule. You have to chase the algorithm. The risk is not invisibility on Youtube. Everyone is invisible. The greatest challenge is being seen.

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It’ll be really easy for this thread to become a YouTuber beat down… live and let live, ultimately whether you like the likes of Bobeats and Andrew Huang or not, they are producing content for an audience. They have an audience for what they do, so it’s valid.

‘Invisibility’ through not listing gear is BS though… if your aim is for people to listen to your music, listing gear is shifting the attention/focus to the gear, thereby diminishing the significance of your music.

So, if it’s really about the music, accept the reality and let a smaller audience focus on that and appreciate it. Seems easy.

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I imagine it all depends on what your purpose is.

Do you want to be a big YouTuber?
Are you trying to be a professional musician?
Are you just doing it for fun and want a better shot at people randomly seeing your stuff?

If you are trying to grow a channel or become a professional musician, it’s probably going to take a lot more than listing gear.

If you are just putting stuff out there for fun, it probably gives you better odds of someone clicking on your video, mainly because people don’t usually just randomly click stuff and the algorithm probably isn’t going to pick it up.

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So i havnt read the whole thread, but if I get the gist of the message, im reminded of a Steve martin quote, and to very roughly paraphrase…
‘Be undeniable!’
Spam the world with your creations, and if you’re genuine, and if you’re really constantly developing as an artist, people will pick up on that. There are some great David Sedaris lines on the subject as well.
I think KiNK is a fantastic example of someone that nobody knew, and now has found his place because of his relentless/fanatic pursuit to develope himself as an artist.
Anyhow, just my 2 very long winded cents

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Dude buy a f#$Ked up barbie doll, tear off it’s head, light its hair on fire, position it with a dead house plant pot full of cigarette butts, fill table space with empty cans, bottles and a half eaten souvlaki (amongst your hardware)… take picture and get your most “XXXXX” media likes ever… same goes for YT vid, just drop a banging set in squalor and the kids will love it.

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Putting name of gear in titles is ok if targeting other synth wanglers, but probably if you want to get more views then genre of music and live performance/mix for title, and some creative thumbnail is probably going to get more attention. A lot of very popular mix videos have bikini clad models in exotic locations, or some other gimmick, like a weird picture etc.

I don’t bother much with youtube these days.

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I can’t think of many producers I like who post jam or gear videos on YouTube. There are a few surgeon vids but most of the jam and gear vids are from people who make music I’ve no interest in or just don’t make music of release quality.

Anyone suggest any established artists that have good YouTube channels?

Ever since the ads took over huh?

There’s ads infront of my own videos now, even though I deliberately never went down the monetization path.

Youtube used to be about cool interesting shit. Now its just mostly shit.

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Same here. All I do is help youtube understand what the video is about so it can show interested people what they are looking for.

But the order in which people decide if they want to watch a video is Thumbnail > Titel.

So I would argue that if your Thumbnails show the gear you can use simple titels.

Still, you need youtube to serve people your video which it does by keywords in the Titel, descripton, tags and how many people watched the video based on similar search terms.

Edit: IMHO I’d say that using gear names in the titel makes the whole process easier. You can probably grow without doing all best practices, but at a slower rate compared to people who check all boxes.

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To me this [added: I mean OP’s initial post and the whole discussion in general] suggests that there’s a duality between musicians that use gear as promotional leverage vs authentic musicians of some sort. But I think it’s honest to accept that most if not near-all professionally successful musicians these days will have to make serious efforts to self-promote. If it’s not one way it’s another. Just trying to add some realistic nuance to the convo.

Wether you want to self-promote or not, or through which means, is of course still the question. If I would aspire to be an artist that gets taken seriously completely for my vision of something; I’d probably not choose to leverage the gear list method indeed.

This is all hypothetical of course. Personally this is just a hobby, and I often list gear because it helps me get in contact with likeminded people.

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