Justin Bieber famously found his first fame on YouTube, but music industry veteran Scott Cohen thinks artists can learn from a new generation of stars emerging on the video service.
Speaking at the Music 4.5: The Rise of Video conference in London, Cohen said Jenna Marbles, Tiffany Alvord and Dave Days are just three examples of YouTubers who can offer valuable lessons for labels and musicians alike.
"What are these kids teaching us that we’re missing? Because they’re doing things very differently to the way the music industry’s doing it," said Cohen, who claimed that Marbles (real name: Jenna Mourey) is on track for $10m of earnings from a mixture of advertising and endorsements in 2013, driven by her YouTube channel's 11.4m subscribers.
"YouTube is their social media platform. It is how they’re getting their message out. That is how they’re engaging with their audience. And it’s their revenue platform. When was the last time you saw an artist that had a really popular tweet that went viral: how much were they paid? On YouTube, you’re making money."
Cohen is the founder of digital music distributor The Orchard, as well as managing bands including the Raveonettes and the Dum Dum Girls. In October, his company launched a multi-channel network (MCN) on YouTube to help labels and artists make more money from use of their music on Google's video service.
"Now we’re in a world of micro-content: 15 seconds, 30 seconds … Four minutes long? Fucking hell, is that too long! Who has got enough time to stop and check out something that is four minutes long," said Cohen. "But 15 seconds? Yeah. And it’s not all dogs on skateboards … What we’ve got to learn is what can artists do with this format?"
The Music 4.5 conference focused on YouTube's potential for the music industry and musicians, including trends that are being driven by MCNs – the term used for companies with networks of channels on the video service – and their young YouTubers, rather than established companies and stars.
"The music industry is moving ever more from a unit-based to an attention-based economy. Engagement is measured and rewarded," said Caroline Bottomley, chief executive of Radar, a company that pairs labels and artists with music video directors.
Cohen agreed. "The idea is attention equals money. No longer are we in a world where we’re selling products in units of things," he said. "We now have to get our heads around that we’re not actually in the attention economy, and those YouTubers totally get it: they build their audience, feed them all week long, and that’s how they get their money."
The musician Laura Kidd, who records under the name She Makes War, praised YouTube as a way for people to find out about her music, then buy it or tickets to see her concerts through links embedded in her videos.
Kidd recently sold 100 handmade packages of her Butterflies Audiovisual EP costing £15 or £20, which included a DVD with videos for each track. "A lot of my fans want to sit with their big TV watching the performances, and some of them just want to watch them on YouTube," she said.
"For me, it became the new MySpace when everyone thought Facebook was going to become the new MySpace. MySpace was really easy to browse, and Facebook is not easy to browse."
At the event, YouTube's head of music partnerships in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, Candice Morrissey, said labels and artists are learning to use YouTube for more than just publishing their official videos – another lesson learned from the YouTubers.
"A lot of musicians are doing way more than just putting their songs: interacting with their audience, doing backstage, behind the scenes, asking ‘what song would you like me to play tomorrow?’," said Morrissey. "This is more easy as the different social platforms are getting integrated into YouTube. Mainly Google+ but not only that."
The idea of musicians connecting with their fans through these kinds of videos was mirrored by Eric Mackay, vice president of international business affairs and business development at Vevo, which currently generates 4.8bn monthly views of music videos from 256m viewers.
"For us, the really big thing is about fan engagement. It’s really important to know what your fans want, and then you super-serve them," he said. "If it’s a 30-second clip of them on the road because something funny has happened … If a user feels connected to that artist, they’ll watch more videos."
MCN Base79 works with a number of labels and artists on YouTube, and its head of music content partnerships Jamie Searle said more labels now understand that they need to actively build communities of fans on YouTube around their artists' videos, rather than simply publishing them and hoping for a viral hit.
"You have to think a lot now about how people are going to find your content. Audience development is a really important consideration," he said. "You need to think about building up your audience around your content, especially if you’re a label. You can’t just rely on people finding it and sharing it and it going viral. You need to have a readymade audience to seed this content to."
YouTube's ability to be used for commerce – those links to music, merchandise and ticket stores – is already a powerful tool for musicians, at a time when streaming audio services like Spotify are being criticised for lacking them. Mackay warned that these features should not be misused, however.
"If you’re trying to flog me shit, I’m not going to buy it. Consumers are savvy: they know when you’re trying to flog them something that’s completely pointless," he said.
Mackay also hinted at the potential for subscription-based music video services: for example, parents paying for a service that filtered out videos inappropriate for children. Vevo is one of the companies under pressure to introduce age ratings for music videos, spearheaded by the Rewind&Reframe campaign.
The conference also saw Cohen giving his views on a new area of expansion for music videos: in-car viewing, initially through cars with connectivity built in and screens for rear-seat passengers, but eventually for every occupant of self-driving vehicles.
"In 10 years, when we begin to take away driving as one of the things somebody does in an automobile, and you’re just sitting in it, this is another place where video consumption is going to go on the rise."
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