When Andrew first heard the music from the video game he was playing, he was hooked. He loved how the music transported him to another world, one where he could be the hero. So, when he found a tutorial on how to make music covers for the game, he jumped on the chance.
He loved how his covers made people laugh and feel a sense of nostalgia. But, as he continued to make covers, he started to notice something. He started to see the game in a different light. He was being told to challenge the way society tells people what is good and what is bad.
The world is full of rules that are designed to keep people in line. But, as Andrew continued to rebel, he started to see that there are other ways to do things. And, as he continued to create subversiveasset, he realized that he could change the world.
@@SpicyChedderJack I mean, just from looking at the initial data coming in, I can't say I disagree in practice. But as a theory nerd, I have to say that RU-vid's "official" explanations would be that publish time is only really important for livestreams and premieres. For videos on demand, since most people aren't watching from a purely chronological traffic source like the subscriptions feed, the other traffic sources that are algorithmically based pull videos for viewers whenever they visit the page.
What an impossible coincidence that you upload a Star Control 2 music video a few days after i discovered it too thanks to the Orz hitting the YT algorithm recently. That aside, this song's quite chill, glad you're still around doing stuff you enjoy 💪.
I did't realised my channel was suspended for 12 hours. I got an email about it and another one saying sorry for this, "we have lifted the suspension". I had no warnings or spam comments etc....
as a guy who is subscribed to many musicians yes I often start with what is familiar but I don't stop there I also go with genres of music that I like and I don't just listen to video game covers even though I do really enjoy those I also listen to music from the west and music from the east or asia whether they are covers or remixes heck some people even translate songs from other languages into their own or sing songs from languages they don't speak, it gets wild out there, but yeah it starts with personal interest but once someone proves themselves to me whether it is with performance, creativity or even if they have just passion I will give just about anything they do a shot because after all music should be about freedom of expression and that artist wanting to convey something to you, to me it shouldn't just be about entertainment alone but I get the feeling not everyone shares that sentiment unfortunately
I follow a number of music channels. None are really big, like Lindsey. Although Taylor Davis did well for herself. Still, in the wider creative space, most creative types are not thriving here on YT.
The fact that there are so many comments like this makes me feel that a lot of people think that way and decide never to click on the video at all. So I probably need to do a better job at convincing people before they have clicked 😅
The whole "playing as a colonizer" bit in Knight of Lodis is one of the greatest examples of wasted potential for a video game premise. But Lans' story is indeed tragic, a naive, good willed boy bloodying his hands for the sake of a lost love, and losing himself to the chaos of the world. Thank you for making this, it really highlights his tragedy and the brutality of the Ogre Battle world.
While I mostly listen to videogame music of the games that I've played, It's also fairly common for me to find new musicians while hearing other songs from my playlist, it might just be that I'm curious about what a video has to offer but when I'm listening to something I usually scroll down to see what I find and if i find something interesting more often tham not i click on the video. I'd say that's how I found most of the music on my playlist.
I feel like this problem has always been there for musicians, and RU-vid has just repackaged it. In the pre-internet days, musicians still had to do networking and marketing and navigating mechanical licenses if they played covers, and generally do stuff to set themselves apart and convince the local radio station that 5 people listen to to give them some air time or a venue to let them open for the headliner, unless they could get a record deal and have someone else promote them. The problem RU-vid brings is scale, since here you're not just competing with other musicians in your area, but every kind of content that monopolises people's attention across the world for the whole platform, including the big ones with millions of dollars worth of marketing behind them.
@@SamWickens I think this has a lot of truth. The charitable read on it would be that because you can reach billions in the Internet vs the 5 people listening to the local radio station, being willing to put in the work on the Internet will reap disproportionately higher rewards. Even if 100 views is not a lot in Internet terms, it absolutely is way easier to achieve than 100 local concert goers
Good discussion! I think you're right on with a lot of this. RU-vid is pretty much the only social media site I still use regularly, and the site I've had, BY FAR, the most success growing on (even before I deleted Twitter, I had fewer views from 4-5 years of sharing my stuff on Twitter than, say, Whatsapp, an app I have literally never used.) But even still, it's a slow boil. Which for me, is fine; I've been very good about managing my expectations and focusing more on personal enjoyment than on metrics. But I also know that's tougher for people who want to become financially stable off it, or grow a large audience, or get placements in media, or whatever goal people might have. I did have a realization a bit ago; I don't really have strong evidence for this, but I think one of the things holding individual performance videos back is that they almost always sit in this presently awkward 2-5 minute length, where it is too long for the short form, infinite scroll hypnotism of Shorts/Tiktok, but also not long enough (alone) for the people who are just looking for longer-form videos to put on in the background or zone out / sleep to for an extended time. And that's tough, because it seems like those are the two biggest ways videos are consumed nowadays. One possibility that might be worth pursuing is focusing more on playlists, which can appeal more to that long-form group. Lucas Cooper (bless that man) has been fantastic with that on Spotify, and I genuinely attribute the success I've had on that platform largely to playlist curators like him. Looking at my own metrics on RU-vid, after Searches (42%), my second highest traffic source (15%) is actually from playlists as well (most of which coming from my own IP-specific playlists). I think for those of us who are more "singles" minded than "album" minded, this may be a solid avenue to consider implementing more. Branching out into other ideas is also probably a worthwhile venture, if you have other things that might be interesting to make and blends well with the stuff you're already doing, though it's still worth remembering that it's a struggle getting noticed in every other genre, too. For every GameGrumps, there are still 10000 other let's play channels struggling just as hard. With Twitch, I remember reading that if you average more than *6* viewers, you're already in the top 5% because the VAST majority of streamers are streaming to basically nobody. (Which is fine, as long as you're having fun and not hedging all your bets on it, but again, that goes back to the "managing expectations" thing.)
addressing the comment out of order, last paragraph first. I definitely have seen metrics like what you mention for Twitch. On RU-vid, 88% of videos get under 1000 views in their lifetime. 9% of videos get between 1k to 10k views. 2% of videos get between 10k to 100k. And under 1% of videos get >100k views. So, statistically, even getting to 1000 is doing extremely well. Totally a "managing expectations" thing. Going back to the first paragraph, I agree that RU-vid appears to offer the most opportunity. (I mean, actually, I get much better metrics on spotify, but I simply cannot post MOST of my music on spotify because most of my covers aren't easily licenseable lmao.) I'm not so sure that the length is the deciding factor...i think people who look at shorts are their own group. That being said, RU-vid is now increasing the potential length of shorts to be up to 3 minutes, so I guess people can experiment with whether they get better results from making shorts rather than long form videos in that up to 3 minute time frame.
@@subversiveasset On the last point, yea, it's possible I'm wrong. I also don't mean to put all the weight on the length necessarily; just that 2-4 minute performance-style YT single content only really works for people willing to sit down at RU-vid and individually click through specific videos that, at a glance, look like it might interest them, which is a lot harder to sell nowadays than the infinite-scroll auto-feed that places like Tiktok offer to a lot of the newer generations. (I have seen more and more people lately getting tired of this form of content though, so I'm cautiously optimistic that it won't be a forever thing.) It's interesting that Shorts are being increased, though since Tiktok did that a while ago, I'm not surprised YT is doing the same. I'd be curious to hear if that affects YT Shorts results at all, though I realized quickly I _hate_ filming vertically, so I'll leave that to others.
You could always try making other kinds of videos but producing your own music for it. I think the YMS guy started out as a musician, then when he pivoted to movies he would promote his albums at the end. He also talks a lot about the music in what he reviews, which gives him the chance to show his own talent and knowledge.
@@stevep9177 this definitely fits in the theme of "don't be just a musician, don't make music videos." Did you ever listen to the YMS guy's music based on him to promoting an album at the end of something totally different? (That being said, absolutely seeing some video game musicians get into game development to create games including their music, so it's not unheard of)
@@subversiveasset I only knew he made music because he plugged it at the end of his movie videos with a 5ish second sample. YMS was one of my "background noise" channels at the time, which is probably the only reason I heard his music often enough that I finally decided to check it out.
First off I really wanna mention I find it absolutely absurd that the growth gurus are telling you to not make music. I can understand that as a self published musician, taking care of your releases and making sure people can get to them is part of what you got to do. But I dislike telling people they have to change their content for it to be found. Anyways as a game developer I really dislike that developers at youtube would say that the algorithm just follow the viewer. On a base level that is very much true. But the entire website and ecosystem does affect what a viewer is more likely to engage with. In games this can be very apparent, because some game-elements make it more likely for players to act in a certain way. When a games only proper mode of communication is teabagging over someones corpse that will lead to more toxicity due to the only mode of interaction being making fun of people that lost. In comparision fromsoftwares (dark souls devs) game have a really jolly feeling of cooperation in multiplayer thanks to in-world emotes, which allow you to greet people, show of some weapon or show your chivalry or respect. Outside of the game of course this isn't as visible because of the high amount of marketing to challenge players that barely engage with the multiplayer aspects. (Afterthoughts made a great video that touches on this called: "Can we make games less toxic? YES.") Similarly to a toxic online game having an issue with only allowing modes of interaction that blame others for their mistakes. I believe youtube has an issue with users only being allowed to interact throughout of the algorithm to find content. I think I already mentioned this on your discord channel, but I really dislike the youtube search feature. I think it is a major reason why people don't find new music through youtube. Because there's just no way to do so other than hoping the algorithm has blessed you with a video that has 20 views. I cannot pop something like or "saxophone music" into the title-bar and look at whatever saxophone music someone has thrown onto this platform. I can kind of get this when I restrict my search by time. But the filter options are reset with every new search query and are very vague. And then without specific Browser addons youtube will try its best to get you away from this search bar by showing you shorts and switching the search results out with your normal recommendations. RU-vid does NOT want people to use the search function. And I think this kind of proves your point. The only way to get views on youtube is to hang on to thin threads that connect your videos to already existing topics. And this IS an issue with youtube, a search that allows users to filter more efficiently by release time as well as topic would help find more new things. But the sad part is, something like this is very unlikely to be implemented by youtube. And even if it probably wouldn't have an instant enormous impact on indie artists due to the existing systems that encourage to watch either 2 minute or 2 hour videos and the users being used to feeding of their recommendations. So this is not an option. So the only means to adress this issue to me is on a personal level. The best I can do t fix this issue is to look for niche things through other means than youtube. In music I am not very well educated on the possibilities. But in future I hope to use websites like Bandcamp and Soundcloud more extensively. As for now, I mostly listen to Touhou music, therefore I am using a website to look through all the newest remix-albums and check up on the XFDs to see if I am interested. Sometimes these albums are collection albums that cover a broad spectrum of artists so I can look those up if I want. And I also listen to Gensokyo Radio which has a pretty broad range of albums and musicians (all touhou remixes of course). When it comes to video games I have a far better outlook to find new artists. Itchio is focused on indie developers and allows users to find new games FAAAAAAAAAAAR more easily than trying to do anything similar on youtube. In fact I am currently subscribed to the newest metroidvania games coming out on itchio via RSS feed. Taking a short glance on my second screen I can see I might play through "suta koreku", "Catto Chateau", "Well Met", "Katana Rabbid", "Bo-Blob", "NBB.exe", "An Amazing Wizard: Prologue" and "odiosa". And while lots of stuff on itchio is bad, I love games so i have no issue playing some kids first video game. Honestly I LOVE playing some kids first video game, always very nostalgic. I think feeds that show the most recent releases and maybe the recent popular releases are a good way to find new things. If you know of any music platforms that would allow me to look through things in such a manner with maybe some tags to get some filtering, please do tell me. I'd really love to try find more music without relying on youtube or it being Touhou remixes. (And lastly: I checked up on the video you skipped in the beginning and I think the twitter post was only reffering to the video having many views. In a way saying that the cross-platform-marketing-machine works. At first I thought he was trying to say the music was outstanding because it had a little gimmick where some lines would only be played out of the left or right speaker fitting to the lyrics. But I don't think they are interested enough about the music as to care about some minor artistic aspect like that.)
To be total charitable to the gurus, they usually recommend reflection on goals and self-determination. So it's more like a "conditional" -- IF you want to grow on RU-vid, THEN do things that the audience will enjoy (and that's not music videos). IF you just want to do RU-vid as a personal hobby, THEN you can do whatever you want. I appreciate what you've written about how developed systems can "prime" behavior, and I think there's probably something to that. The poor search systems likely result in people using search less, which result in more reliance on algorithms, which reinforces algorithmic results. And yet, here we are where audience behavior is broadly to rely on algorithms. I'm still getting a lot of impressions through this -- I am not hurting because people aren't able to search "saxophone music." I'm hurting because even though 2000 people are shown my thumbnails, I can't convince more than 1% of them to click and watch. I don't think that improving search would help with this because I don't think that people would be searching for what I'm making. A search-based approach means it's even more important to create things tailored to the things that are top of a potential audience members' mind, whereas algorithm does allow for people to discover things that they wouldn't ever have proactively searched for. (regarding the last point, yeah, tweet 3 was about a video from a different musician than tweet 2 or tweet 1, so i probably should have clicked through to see what was going on there.)
I have only a 1/40 of your subscribers. My numbers are all over the place. What is a 2000+ Video here might not really work on Spotify and vice versa. And no one seems to use YT Music 🤔 when it’s just the music Thank for your thoughts. I will consider all of them
@@SoulinSadness my fun issue for Spotify is I keep doing covers that are not easily licensed for Spotify. But yeah, totally different traffic patterns here vs there!
@@subversiveasset There is also much truth in "people click on things they already know" yeah... I hear the same thing from movietubers: Always chased by the new "big thing"
Amazing thought out video. I generally rely on Bandcamp and sometimes spotify for new music. At best; youtube lets me know that something is out. Thanks for sharing your rhoughts and insights!
The same reason we saw the big music channels of old slow die off like Mystery Guitar Man, or more recently Seth Everman. RU-vid is unfortunately not optimized for art, but rather engagement, and small creators will suffer for it. I want to say something, but I don't have enough knowledge on the subject to make any kind of recommendation. I think the biggest thing is that when people see your videos thumbnails, they are not clicking on them. Finding the reason for that is probably going to be what makes or breaks your channel.
@@SpicyChedderJack 100% agreed. Overall, since everything gets back to audience behavior - what will someone click and watch on - that means that understanding audience psychology and behavior becomes the most important thing. At this point, I'm still interested in understanding how (or even if) people decide to watch new music on RU-vid. If you think about your own watch history, do you have any personal thoughts?
@@subversiveasset From personal experience, and looking at my history, a big motivator appears to currently be either eye catching text, or anime women. you can come to whatever conclusion you want about what that says about me, but I similarly don't often seek out new music on youtube, and when I have found it in the case of ShadyCicada or Sponzi those are the consistancies between the two.
The struggle is real! I think you laid out a lot of great reasons that people aren't successful today with music, but I think another big one is bias toward videos that already have social proof. If a video has 50k views, it's *much* more likely to be clicked than one that is new with under 1k. There was a thread on twitter a few months back where johnathan young mentioned he would never click on a video with fewer than 1k views on it because it's "not good." Or doesn't appeal to a wide enough audience. It might be good, but unless enough people give it a try and share it, it'll never reach the threshold that other people are willing to click. There's a reason that the covers from 2015 are *still* getting 100 views per hour, and that's because they have millions of views. Even if something new is of the same caliber as the old one, any reasonable person will pick the one that is "proven" rather than risk wasting their time on something unproven.
@@SheaViolin I'm going to have to find that Jonathan Young thread, LMAO. I know people have hypothesized about social proof being a big factor, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone state it that starkly. that's a really foreign perspective to me. That being said, I think that there are other "tells" beyond view count, such as more amateur thumbnails or titles, etc, but I think that smaller RU-vidrs can learn how to design similar thumbnails to more established RU-vidrs - that just takes time and practice. I have heard rumors of RU-vid considering experimenting with removing view counts from being shown. Maybe that would end up being a really controversial decision like removing public dislike count?
i just don't think view count SHOULD be used as an indicator of quality. The argument for dislikes was a bit shakier (but the argument from RU-vid was that people were using dislikes for harassment campaigns and making the dislikes visible reinforced that), but someone saying, "I would have watched this video, but because it has <1k views, I'm not going to" seems like an easy problem to fix by not showing the view counts lol.
so what i have found interesting is that in any other type of newsletter or email marketing situation, there's so much advice about how to *trim* your mailing list so that you're only emailing the people most likely to read. People don't want the highest number just to have a higher number. They want a more engaged audience. So, whenever I see people unsubscribe, I try to hold back the tears and say, "this is just someone realizing their tastes have changed, and that's good for everyone ." But then another thing I also notice is that I don't really pay attention to my subscriptions tab anymore. Usually, I watch based on the home page, and recommendations don't have to be based on whether I've subscribed or not. I think a lot of people end up watching a lot of channels they haven't subscribed to because of home page recommendations
@@subversiveasset that makes sense! I've been trying to reframe my mindset but I don't know where to redirect my energy to. So that's one way to think about it and I think that's pretty helpful!
overall, i have been just doing the music I want to, trying to psych myself in for low views, usually failing somewhat, but then I take a few weeks breaks before doing it all over again. probably not the healthiest, but it works for me!
The struggles of being an artist... I know some good ones that have horribly low subscriber counts.... Even when they acquired thousands to millions of views. Heck, I still think that for doing music on RU-vid for as long as he has, Johnny Atma (GaMetal) has a criminally low count... Maybe the game was rigged from the start.. Interestingly, maybe doing some sort of side content would get one more notoriety. Like what if one was a music composer and a .. streamer on the side or something... Lure people in with a talent and then smack them with the music. ... 😭 Either way it doesn't wholly fix the issue though... Oh yo, Subversive mention at the ending. 🤭
At the end of the day, the "game" is audience preferences and behaviors. Overall, if audiences don't like music, then we can't say that's rigged. it's just what people like, and how we will respond to it. But yeah, every indication seems to be, "don't just do music." So music with streaming on the side would probably be more successful. But a lot of musicians aren't interested in doing those other things. I don't really like streaming so I'm probably not ever going to "switch" to that. (I mean, "never say never", but...) But what I have actually seen is musicians simply *change their channel* because the other content isn't really luring people to the music. People just stay for the streaming or just stay for the reactions or whatever. When they see that doing reaction videos is so much more successful than composing (and usually a lot easier as well,) they scale back their covers and scale back their compositions entirely. I have seen SEVERAL musicians change their main content type away from music entirely because the other content performs so much better than the music. I had a screenshot of a tweet response from LionMight at some point in the video, because this is basically what he has done. Look at his most recent videos. Compare the views on the reaction videos to the views on music. It's dramatically different! And i'm not gonna lie, Diwa is a super successful musician, composer, award winning, etc., He has had success offline and online with music. So for *him* to still see that the views are in reactions is really saying something.
Alright this is a really great point that of course, I'm excited to dissect with at 2:30 roughly. Folks who are producing home-grown videos that may have been relatively better received in 2015 or even 2020, does not magically stay novel in 2024 and that's a challenge to every DIY musician. I have a lot of discussions with folks who observe outliers, disregard key aspects that made this music video style format relevant or, subjectively interesting and unique, and wonder why we're at record low viewage for old channels (I know I sure am!). However.. doing things outside of music is now the best way to introduce folks to more traditional performance videos or whichever I do. This year I've played 3 gigs at video game music cons, very difficult to put together and get those opportunities of course, and each time I would meet new people who hadn't heard of me at all but followed me afterwards. People who would see my type of visuals and guitar play would immediately get more of that on my RU-vid channel, even though I don't organically grow my channel in this space. I can't recommend this live-first, shreddy instrumentation method to everyone and I do not believe in shortcuts, but having the VFX/comedic skit style of music video WITH very technical playing is the novelty for me - it probably would at the very least lead to more remarkable content. As a bonus, the metal community tends to enjoy those aspects far more than any one person in their room playing an instrument and I do try to singularly choose trending games or ones where I'll be exclusively covering it.
I think that your comment is absolutely consistent with what Daniel was saying, and with what the coaches/gurus would recommend -- you can't *just* do the performance videos, you have to do things outside of music and then draw them into the performances. Several people commented that they discover new music through seeing unfamiliar bands opening at other concerts, so that is very consistent with your comment about playing gigs at VGM cons. But this does not challenge my point that *RU-vid* isn't the way to grow. Rather, you grow through offline, and then you direct people *to* RU-vid.
IMO for youtube, not maintaining novelty compared to other channels is a very small part of it, the reality is that the YT algo is crushing and ignores old content from small channels, and small channels entirely
Again, when people say "the algorithm is crushing" I want to see data that a RU-vidr has no impressions. Because instead I see that there are impressions, but the audience is choosing not to watch.
@@subversiveasset Videos from 10-15 years ago are completely buried unless they had plenty of impressions at that time. It's damn well near impossible to even find older videos unless you're willing to go scrolling. That is youtube's bias, not a neutral state. I'm not saying this as a content creator (I'm not), but as a viewer who loves that wedge of youtube that captures the original promise of regular people having channels--and every year that wedge is harder to find. P.S. RU-vid's search is terrible, and even worse when compared with simply searching for youtube videos on google.
