SPECIAL FEATURE: THE IMPORTANCE OF LYRIC AND STILL IMAGE VIDEOS IN PROMOTING YOUR MUSIC BY CHRISTINE BEN AMEH

CHRISTINE

The following guest post comes from Christine Ben-Ameh, independent artist & songwriter, currently signed with JTV Digital, a digital distribution company allowing artists & labels to get their music to major digital retail stores and monetize their content online.

Over the years, YouTube’s viewership has grown at quite a phenomenal rate, becoming one of the most powerful music discoveries and marketing channels on the internet.

Reasons for this include the facts that countless sites use YouTube daily to fuel their search engines and many music blog sites only post videos.

In addition, there are people who resort to YouTube in the absence of iPods and iTunes.

Having your music on YouTube enables you to be easily found in Google search thus improving your SEO and ensuring that more people get the chance to listen to your music.

Knowing this, the importance of having a music video cannot be overstated.

Yet the challenge that many artistes face is the inability due to short funding to produce professional video clips.

With this in mind, how can artistes without music videos still take advantage of YouTube in engaging fans and marketing their music?

The solution is simple- Lyric and/or Still image videos.

While Still image videos serve the purpose of engaging your fans they still stand a chance of becoming boring though depending on fan engagement your artiste income more likely will grow from where it previously was.

It is advisable to pay attention to still images used and ensure that they have such qualities to capture your audience and leave them so.

With this in mind, a lyric video works at an advantage because it can also be used for karaoke purposes while drawing attention of your fans to the message you are most passionate about passing across in your music.

Using YouTube’s ContentID feature, you can easily monetize these Lyric or Still image videos, just like any other video clip.

This can be achieved either on your own after applying for a ContentID account and activating monetization on the videos from your channel, or via your digital distributor, like JTV Digital, CDBaby, TuneCore…etc who will take care of setting things up and aggregating any YouTube ad revenue with your other digital sales from other sources (iTunes, Spotify…etc.).

CHRISTINE BEN-AMEH, as songwriter, recording and performing artiste, has won several talent competitions of which the Nokia First Chance reality TV Music Show in August 2007 is a notable mention, and is widely appreciated in the Nigerian indie live music scene till date. 

Some of her notable performances include the world music day concert held in June 2012 at the New Africa Shrine, Lagos-Nigeria, Terra culture, MUSON, The Future Awards, 2008, London Calling Music Fair of June 2008 at the Nigerian Pavilion, LEAP Awards, 2009 and several others. She is currently writing and recording more music and planning a European tour for the summer of 2014. Listen to her album titled “Life Under Construction” ON ITUNES also check www.christinebenameh.com to listen to beautiful music.