Easily Get Your Music On YouTube With Artwork Videos: 3 Quick Ways

You may not realize it, but Youtube has a special program for music artists descriptively called Youtube For Artists. This feature of the Youtube platform will help you promote your music, engage with your fans, and get the most out of the world's largest video platform.

To get started, you will have to go to the Youtube For Artists sign up page. From there, you can start creating your Youtube artist channel. You will get asked to provide information about your music, such as your discography, so that Youtube can organize it into an album section on your channel. It will also put all your official music videos into a special playlist. 

Once you reach 1,000 subscribers, you can even start collecting royalties through Youtube's monetization program. Truth be told, you will not get that much money from this method unless you have millions of views on your videos. However, it is still a nice form of passive income that is worth pursuing once you have the opportunity to do so.

You can use our free music royalty calculator to get an estimate on how much you’ll earn from your streams. 

Before you create your Youtube artist channel, you should prepare some content so you can have a full-fledged channel right out of the gate. The quickest and easiest way to do this is to open up your preferred video editing program and put together music with artwork. You can get all of your music onto Youtube if you wanted to by using this technique.

We’ve promoted for thousands of artists on YouTube, and we find that as long as maybe 1 in every 15 or 20 videos is a music video, you’re completely fine uploading the rest as either album artwork or lyric videos. 

The process is simple. The basic idea is that you create a video where your music plays to a backdrop of an image. This image can be something like your album art, a musician photo, a poster, a stock image, or some simple image you designed for the video to give information on what is playing.

Putting original music on Youtube is relatively simple. All you need is your music, artwork for the video, and a video editing program. You can create artwork videos for Youtube in as little as a few minutes. Here are the basic steps you will have to take, regardless of what program you use.

1. Create your video artwork or gather up existing artwork. Make the dimensions 1920x1080 so they fit Youtube's preferred video dimensions. You will avoid having black bars on your video if you keep to these dimensions.
2. Open up your video editing program and import the image and song you want to turn into a video.
3. Drag the image and song into the video timeline and synchronize them, ensuring the image appears for the entirety of the song. You can get a little fancy and add a fade in/fade out for the video.
4. Make the video by clicking on the button that will render/produce/export/create the video. Save the video as either a WMV or MP4 file if you can, since this will be the easiest to upload to Youtube.
5. Upload your artwork music video to Youtube. You will also have the option of uploading a thumbnail for the video (recommended). If you want it to be something other than what image you have in the video, you can upload it at this step. Make sure the artist and song names are in the title of the video.

That is all there is to it! As you can see, it is a simple process and once you create your first video, you will start getting the hang of it. You can create hundreds of videos this way if your discography is extensive. This is an excellent way to promote your music to more people in a way that requires very little effort on your part.

There are two ways to do this. 

1. To have a popular channel upload your song with their own graphics and artwork.
2. To use a distributor like Tunecore or Distrokid to automatically make album cover artwork videos for you and place them on a ‘topic’ channel. I.e. Omari - Topic instead of our own Omari brand. 

You do not control some aspects of the topic channel, so it does have it’s downside when it comes to customization, but it is quicker to upload.

Teaming up with a Youtube music channel distribution partner can help put your music in front of more people and help grow your audience. These days, there are numerous Youtube channels, such as Add This Music, which will create their own Youtube artwork videos for your music. 

These channels have upwards of millions of subscribers and hundreds of millions of views, meaning you get the opportunity to expose your music to vast amounts of people. You can enter into an agreement with these channels to include links to your websites, social media profiles, as well as other content, into the video descriptions.

You can multiply the exposure your music gets by submitting your music to multiple music distribution channels if they allow that. Some of the bigger channels may ask you to have the right to monetize the videos, which is a judgment call you will have to make. 

If you have a Youtube channel with less than 1,000 subscribers, you will be unable to monetize your videos. This is the type of situation where it makes sense to agree to that type of proposal. However, if you have a channel with thousands of subscribers, you may be better off passing on music distribution channels which make that kind of request.

If you are a music artist, having a Youtube artist channel is a must-have. Youtube is the second most popular website in the world and the largest video platform today. It is a smart move, from both a business perspective and as a means of building your fan base. Music artists like Justin Bieber became household names because one day they decided to upload a video of them singing. Use this incredible opportunity to get your voice heard and make artwork videos to promote your music to millions of people.