YouTube music promotion: how to promote music on YouTube

YouTube is two places for a musician. YouTube Music is a streaming service like Spotify, where your songs sit as audio. YouTube itself is the video platform, where people watch music videos, find songs through Shorts and follow artists' channels. The two are connected: the same song, the same channel and the same subscribers show up in both.

This guide explains how each part works and how to promote a release across them. It's part of our guide to getting more listeners.

How your music gets onto YouTube Music

You don't upload songs to YouTube Music yourself. Your distributor delivers them, with the cover art and the details of each track, the same way it delivers to Spotify and Apple Music.

From that delivery, YouTube makes an Art Track for every song: a YouTube version of the track, made of the sound recording and the cover art. YouTube's page on what an Art Track is says their purpose is to give every track on every album a YouTube version. Art Tracks are what play when someone streams your song on YouTube Music, and they show up in search on YouTube too.

Before you have an Official Artist Channel, YouTube may also make a Topic channel for you ("Your Name - Topic"), which collects your Art Tracks automatically. That's normal, and it's one of the channels an Official Artist Channel brings together.

The Official Artist Channel

An Official Artist Channel (OAC) puts all your YouTube channels, subscribers and music in one place. YouTube's OAC page sets out who can have one. Among the requirements:

• you own and run one YouTube channel for a single artist or band, focused on the music;
• you have at least one official release on YouTube, delivered by a distributor or label;
• the channel follows YouTube's policies.

YouTube also lists ways to qualify through a partner, such as having your music delivered by a distributor in its directory of music partners. The request itself comes from your distributor or label. YouTube recommends having at least one public video on the channel before it's requested.

The OAC matters because it gives your songs a home. YouTube's page on OAC sections describes a Music videos section that collects your official videos and Art Tracks from all your channels, a Releases section, and a "Popular Sounds from Shorts" shelf of your songs ranked by how often they've been used in Shorts over the past seven days. It also lets you add your own shelves of playlists.

Content ID: your song in other people's videos

Content ID is YouTube's system for matching uploads to copyrighted music. YouTube explains that every new upload is scanned against files that copyright owners have submitted. When a video uses a song in the database, the owner's settings decide what happens: the video can be monetized with ads, tracked for its viewing figures, or blocked, and each choice can differ by country.

Only copyright owners who meet YouTube's criteria can use Content ID directly. Most independent artists reach it through a distributor or a rights service. Before you turn it on, think about how you want fans to use your song: a claim on a fan's video can earn you money from it, and some artists prefer to let fan videos run freely so the song travels.

Shorts: where many listeners first hear a song

YouTube Shorts are short vertical videos. YouTube's page on music in Shorts says videos count as Shorts when they're vertical and up to three minutes long. When people make Shorts with your song, each one links back to it, and your OAC shows the songs being used most.

Make Shorts of your own around a release: the hook, a moment from recording, a live take, the story behind a line. Short clips reach people who don't follow you yet, and the most-used parts of a song tend to be the ones that fit a few seconds of video well. Our guide to promoting music with YouTube Shorts covers ideas and formats.

Premieres: making a new video an event

A Premiere lets you schedule a new video so viewers watch it together. YouTube's Premieres page explains how it works: a watch page goes up ahead of time with a countdown, viewers can set a reminder and are notified before it starts, and a live chat runs before and during the Premiere. Afterward, the video stays on your channel as a normal upload, with the Premiere's views counted.

A Premiere suits a music video, a lyric video or a visualizer on release day. Share the watch page in the days before, be in the chat when it starts, and pin a comment with the link to the song on every service.

Promote the release on your channel

Treat your channel like any other place your listeners are, with posts before, on and after the day:

• Before: Shorts with a clip of the hook, the cover, a moment from the studio, and the pre-save link in the description and your channel links.
• On the day: the music video, lyric video or visualizer, as a Premiere if you like, with the release link pinned in the comments.
• After: more Shorts from different parts of the song, live versions, the story behind it, and a playlist on your channel that keeps the new song next to your others.

Pick a cover image for each video that reads at a small size, and add each new video to one of your channel's playlists so viewers keep watching. Our guide to how to promote your music covers the other platforms.

How Audora handles YouTube

Audora delivers every release to YouTube Music along with Spotify, Apple Music, TikTok and 140+ stores, and into the databases radio stations, cars and song recognition read (Gracenote, Shazam and others). Each release goes out with a pitch for the people who market it to the stores, and Audora dates it to give the editors time.

Around the release, Audora plans a promotion campaign with posts for your YouTube channel among the others. Each post is written in your voice, with its caption, hashtags and the picture or video it needs, and you approve what goes out. On YouTube you pick the cover for each video from your Library or an upload, add the video to one of your channel's playlists and post your first comment under it. Scheduled posts sit on YouTube's own schedule, so you see them in YouTube Studio.

TikTok, YouTube, Instagram (Stories included) and Facebook Pages post automatically, and nothing goes out until you approve it. Stories carry no link sticker, so your release link goes in your bio.

The first video Audora makes for you is on us. After release, each post that went out shows its numbers in Promo as YouTube reports them, including where the views came from and the top countries, and every playlist your song is on is shown back to you.

The exact steps for your release, YouTube included, are in your Audora account, dated to your release day. Audora keeps tuning them, adding, dropping and retiming steps as it learns what works best for its artists. See what every track gets for everything that goes out with a release.