Haha! Yeah definitely with you there. His videos are nuts, his reviews are almost impossible to understand as so distorted, his jams are hilarious, remind me of a kid at school pinging their ruler constantly but it sounding amazing.
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Are you trying to build an audience of (wannabe) producers? Post the gear in the title, description, and feature the gear in your video.
Are you trying to build an audience of people who just like your style of music? Ignore the gear and make cool music and videos.
I don’t listen to music because of the gear. I listen to music because I like the music.
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Why is it that everyone want to be famous today?
I’m actually famous and i’ll tell you: does not really worh it
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It does often seem that way, but it probably just as many who don’t want to he famous but end up being popular just because of the system we live in.
Being famous is a massive fear for me personally.
I remember having a long discussion here about youtube musicians and how i think they’re not “musicians” really but media personalities or entrepreneurs, with an added side of running a one person advertisement agency. It’s music as content made for selling their brand, or gear, not music made just it’s own sake. Very commercial and extremely late stage capitalist.
I mean if you wanna make it no matter what, I guess playing the youtube game is a way to achieve name & money. But personally, and I think a lot of musicians, amateur or pro agree with me here, I’d NEVER go down that path and kind of don’t see the people who do on the same level as people who don’t, artistically. Kind of like a guitar technician vs. guitarist in a band, or a music store employee vs. amateur musician… Eh, comparison doesn’t exactly work, but I hope you understand my point.
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There certainly is an abundance of that on YouTube, and arguably the popular ones are likely to be better at selling whatever it is they are selling.
I’m not sure how making money through making music on YouTube makes you less of a musician though, although i guess that depends on what we think of as a musician or how they go about it.
There has always been a history of new eras and ways of doing stuff that challenges and changes what we think of as music, talent, success etc YouTube is for sure a part of that, for better or worse.
Depeche Mode were often misunderstood for not being real musicians, drum machines were misunderstood for not being real drummers, sequencers misunderstood for not sounding like real music etc
For me YouTube at its worst is many capitalists, and at its best, someone using it for changing the tide or integral to a small culture shift or activity.
You do make lots of good points though, and i certainly don’t entirely disagree.
Does anyone actually make money on Youtube with music, as opposed to running a sort of low budget TV show with gear tutorials etc? Like, there’s those channels that play lofi hip hop or w/e, those are different.
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Yeah for sure, but I suspect it’s not always the sole income and just part of sharing, promoting music.
I think that’s the difference your talking about if I understand correctly, the sole YouTuber who make’s money doing whatever they do to be financially successful or professional in YouTube, versus maybe it’s more a musician who does the same, perhaps only including YouTube as a part of income but still important.
I guess the challenge, such as listing YouTube videos with no gear in the titles, is the sacrifice of going down the YouTube route and it maybe being more successful, or it just being part of a larger network. Like everytime Sakamoto plays piano on YouTube it’s rammed, and that’s definitely helping his sales I would assume.
It’s tricky though for sure, still working this out myself obviously.
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It’s a fine line I think, being an artist and using social media to boost your income or visibility vs. going down the youtuber path where you basically have a day job as a youtuber and do music on the side.
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vs the more traditional route of
- Barista in the morning
- Waiter in the afternoon
- Bartender at night
- Musician between
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Yeah totally, i think that’s probably why we are seeing these sorts of threads, as we know something feels off, but it’s hard to navigate around it as the system says that’s what you need to do to get what you think you want.
I think most Synthtubers make their money selling off YouTube stuff like their patreon or sample packs or classes. Assuming those “here’s how I make money” videos that many did a year or two ago were honest. I think average YouTube income is like $0.50 per 1000 views from when I looked it up.
I put my music on YouTube many years ago and it was just the music. Not many views (<100). And I randomly put up a video of me performing on a synth with the gear in the title and using the synth in somewhat unique way and it started getting hundreds of views a week. The music to the live vid was objectively not as good as the music I put on up by itself. I could feel it hijacking my brain watching the process. I didn’t like how unhealthy it felt to me.
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Hah! Point is I guess that it’s exactly the same, you just work on youtube instead of a cafe 
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Vocals, Guitars VSC3
Percussion, Tape Effects
Keyboards, Vocals, VCS3
Bass Guitar, Vocals VCS3, Tape Effects
45 million albums sold. Written on the inside of the design
They were doing the name game thang back in the 70’s.
Answers on a postcard.
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Yeah exactly. What gets people to click and watch, and if you think it’s any good are pretty disconnected much of the time.
My most clicked video thumbnail reads “i wish my Analog Rytm was black” which seemed pretty predictable. Just goes to show how it works. Although I wonder how much of this could be considered a record cover, an interview in a mag, a poster for a live show, the bio of an artist. It all feels very similar in some cases.
Yeah totally, it’s just a new format, and arguably the first or closest to media in general, which makes it so unusual I suppose.
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If you aren’t invoking ancient goddesses, are you really a musician?
(From KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money)
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A bit off topic, but reading some of the posts here denigrating YouTube made me want to say that the information about music production and gear available on YouTube is an unbelievable resource.
I used to be a professional craftsman in a rather obscure field and learning and finding information was basically the hardest part of the job. I had to go and apprentice with people in Sweden and Denmark because they were the only ones who knew how to do it and they were very secretive about how it was done (think medieval guild secrets lol). It was so hard getting accepted and have them willing to teach me.
So if you are not taking advantage of the abundant information that YouTube and other internet resources are freely giving out I guess you have not experienced a world where information is a closely guarded secret. Sure there can be a lot of noise you have to sort through, but myself, I am so grateful and feel very lucky that I don’t have to go through years of work (not to mention $$$) to get the information that could be gained through a week of watching YouTube. Avoid it to your own detriment I guess…
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I read a mix of various topics in the thread;
- Become a youtuber
- Become famous
- Become rich
- Be a good artist
They are quite different targets and each one is difficult to reach: trying to add them up to get to all of them at the same time doing the same thing is quite unlikely
Maybe all of those are better than
- get a proper job
Which might explain why people are willing to pimp synths on YouTube…
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