For artists, YouTube provides an outlet and distribution method to share performancevideos, instructional bits, interviews and more. And, if you’ve got something really good
it might just go viral, another word for everybody in the world watching your stuff.
First, set up an account for your act. Then brand it. These are called “channels.”
You’ll find a link to set it up under your name or avatar in the upper right corner of the
site.
Creating a YouTube channel lets you upload videos, create playlists and respond to
videos with comments and control how comments are handled (shown or hidden). Within
your settings, you can also create a custom username. So, if one band member, manager
or publicist handles this for you, a custom username is a handy thing to identify your act.
It’s also important to note that YouTube pulls much information in from your Google ac-
count. So, if you don’t have one of those, it would be a good idea to get one. It’s easy.
Channel branding is a great idea to tie your brand together. YouTube offers many op-
tions for this including a custom header (970 pixels wide and up to 150 high), custom
colors and custom backgrounds. Background images can be up to one megabyte, but
something in the area of 256 KB is better when it comes to page loading times. You don’t
want your visitors to hang around waiting for your background to load, because they
won’t. They’ll leave to watch something else ... like a competitive act’s videos.
Another good thing about YouTube videos is that you can embed them into your site,
blog and/or Facebook page. That means you’ll be tapping YouTube’s bandwidth, not
yours. That becomes important when you start to become popular. When site visitors
click on your video, that requires a thing called bandwidth. It’s akin to a pipe that carries