With TikTok becoming more of a focus for musicians, YouTube has sought to re-state its credentials as a key music discovery platform with a new ‘Analytics for Artists’ dashboard, which will help musicians better understand their platform reach.
As noted by YouTube, more people are currently watching YouTube content than ever, with the COVID-19 lockdowns keeping many indoors. That, in turn, is seeing more people turn to the platform for music content, and the new analytics dashboard will help artists better track such activity.
As explained by YouTube:
“YouTube Analytics for Artists shows how fans engage with your music, whether it’s on your channel, or other places on YouTube. […] As you build a community, we make it easy for you to see videos your fans and other artists are creating using our music.”
As you can see from the video, the aim is to highlight the overall spread of music content on YouTube – which, again, points to the rising threat of TikTok in this respect.
TikTok has become a key destination for music promotion, with some publishers even changing the names of tracks in line with how they’re being referred to on the platform. The view may be that TikTok is now better for viral sharing than YouTube in this respect – but YouTube will be hoping that this new dashboard provides some more perspective for artists to help them better understand the full benefits of YouTube reach in their promotional activities.
For regular users, that won’t make a heap of difference, but by underlining the value of YouTube for artists, it could keep these high-profile creators posting to YouTube more often, which helps to build the overall YouTube community and expand the on-platform eco-system.
If you have an official artist channel (which requires 3 official releases, delivered and distributed by a music distributor or label), then you’ll be able to access new insights, and get a full view of your performance. For everyone else, nothing new – but the addition of these new analytics options could lead to similar distribution and reach tools being added for more account types in future.
