New Music Business: YouTube's Musician's Wanted Program

posted in: Features

YouTube has created a pretty cool program for independent artists, which helps them promote their music to a larger audience and get paid for it. It’s called the YouTube Musician’s Wanted Program. It gives artists the option to allow relevant advertisements to be displayed on your YouTube account all the while splitting the revenues. Although there are no guarantees to how much money you’ll make, the idea is to help artists with high YouTube traffic to make a modest living off of creating engaging YouTube content. In order to participate, you must be the owner of the rights to your music videos, and your videos must actually be video content”and not just audio or slide shows.

YouTube is looking for users who regularly produce videos intended for wide audiences”often times videos that have had some commercial success already. Once you apply for the program, YouTube analyzes your account and factors in the popularity of your videos, the number of subscribers the users involvement with the community and the users track record with following YouTube’s terms of service.

Take a look here to see some examples of artists who are currently using this program.

If you’re thinking about applying, you should start by reading the Qualifications and FAQ.

The main benefit of the program is the sharing of the ad revenue between your band and YouTube. However, if you’d like to check out the other benefits of the program, take a look at the partner benefits page.

If you’ve applied for this program already, we’d love to hear your thoughts!