@FluteCafe and @AlphaVictor, would you guys be willing to answer a few business related questions. It seems like you have a thing going on that has a good number of followers and some videos that have had lots of views. I have a few questions. Obviously you only need to answer the ones you want to. I just find the music business interesting.
Do you guys do this as your full time job? or is it just a hobby?
If full time job, are you raking in big money, or are you constantly wondering if you will survive the next month?
Do you get lots of side work related to your youtube channel?
Does Youtube bring in much in ad revenue, or is it more of a nice bonus? Or nothing at all?
How long have you been doing this, and how long did it take you to grow your following to it’s current state? Is the rate of growth growing or slowing?
What are some of the marketing tactics that have worked well, and what are some that have been lame?
I probably have a bunch of other questions, but those are the ones I could come up with off the top of my head.
@bozmillar thank you , we built up Flute Cafe just for fun with a few friends after we met at a common friends wedding. We were the “music entertainment” lol. Someone suggested start a youtube channel so we did.
We are in non music related full time jobs (I am Computer engineer) Alpha (Andrew) is Heavy Electrical and Aeronautics. Flute Cafe ended up getting quite a bit of traction on social media, but is is still in its growth stage. Our direction now however, is to make sound track libraries (sort of like for Movie trailers, commercials, video games etc) for domestic and international scene.
We are working on one right now, about to release it.
Here is a very rough sample…
it is a hobby @bozmillar we started this together a while back with a couple other friends. It wasnt meant to be a full time job or anything
Flute Cafe brings in supplemental revenue from youtube , sheet music blog. Live shows (weddings) though it has been really hard to co-ordinate doing live shows so we are sort of taking a new route.
We do get side work, after one of our tracks went viral, it got attention of some international music directors. We recently got an opportunity to write for director of Slumdog Millionaire (cant reveal much of it publicly) but which is one reason why we are expanding into soundtracks. To be the next Hans Zimmer! giggles
It brings in revenue, for youtube, revenue starts increasing as your channel gets overall more views, has viral videos and such. You start getting better ads show up on your channel eventually. It started with near to no revenue at first then it is somewhat significant now, around 1.5k a month. Alpha calls it" booze" money lol
Youtube revenue increases dramatically with growth, I have friends who are well in 6 figures just from youtube ad revenue, they have much better presence though. (We are getting there)
We have been doing this seriously for about 2 years. First year growth was slow, next year it was better. Right now we are growing in sub count on youtube pretty well. (rate of about a 1000 subs a week and growing). From what I know about youtube growth is that it happens in tiers. Once you reach a top tier (25k subs) growth accelerates dramatically (we are almost there). Once you hit one of the top tiers, you are featured next to other bigger channels that helps growth even more. It can shoot up from 25k to 100k subs in under a year.
literally no marketing. Just made music and had fun. I know we should be looking at marketing and we are definitely looking more into it now.
Hey
Interesting stuff.
Do you find that you need to keep to a regular schedule of posting videos in order to get any growth & if so how often do you post?
Posting videos regularly is important but more important is to stay ‘active’ on a daily basis. As in commenting on other channels and responding quickly to comments that you receive on yours. That is a youtube secret many dont share. Yall are a bunch of nice people
Youtube looks at your last active flag a lot while calculating ‘discovery’ that depends on a combination of your relevance and ranking. Staying active and having your videos being actively played on youtube helps a ton. If you have friends, ask them to click your channel and listen to your videos everyday. If not everyday, once a week definitely.
Ah, great to know!
So - its important to follow other channels and get involved with them? Its interesting how youtube works (beyond just posting vids)
its important to stay “very active” as in actively responding to comments you receive (most important) and commenting on other channels that are relevant to yours because it will get you interaction on other channels (as in likes and comments on your comment on other channels, it add adds up). Never disable your comments or likes and dislikes. Feel free to engage in long discussions on your youtube channel, number of comments helps your rankings.
That’s interesting. I’ve never really considered that (not that I’ve ever needed to). I always view youtube as just a huge place to upload videos, but it makes sense that Youtube wants people hanging around youtube, so the more you treat it as a place to hang out and have discussions and get pother people to stay too, the more Youtube will like you and promote your stuff.
I think you guys are already doing better than that, your music is cool, and I couldn’t think of a Zimmer theme to save my life. He’s done a lot of movies, but his scores leave my head as soon as the movie is over. FluteCafe is moving towards John Williams territory.
yeah uploading a video and forgetting about it will definitely be noticed by youtube and will lower the overall score. Many youtubers dont do much after video uploads. Majority of Youtube video views come from suggestions on the side, and your video showing alongside other larger more popular videos. In order for youtube to determine that it looks at Relevance and Ranking.
Here are some more youtube goodies…
Relevance is - keywords, channel keywords, video title, description and interestingly (name of the file itself).
Less is more in this case.
Ranking is social interaction - channel views, subscribers, number of likes, comments, your comments and responses, video bounce rate, video retention and currently active video views and more.
Yeah this is really interesting to me too. I reply to comments I receive on YouTube sometimes, but more often than not I don’t. I always thought it looked tacky/insincere when the video creator responds to every single comment. You think that is helpful though, in terms of how much YouTube promotes your video? Maybe I’ll give it a try… I just hate replying with something generic and feel it’s worse than no reply at all.
It’s so cool in general to see that you’re having such success on Youtube! I started uploading videos in 2007 or so, but never attracted much of an audience. I feel like I’m getting a little more traction in the past year, but I guess I’ll just have to see how it goes. Thanks for sharing your journey!
yes number of total comments, yours and your viewers included are both factored in. So its important to respond to most comments if not all and definitely to your trending videos with most views. I have literally responded to thousands of comments myself. You will notice by doing so your view count starts growing and you will also notice that your video views start coming around the time frame you respond the most.
Copy paste templates help lol but they are mostly a variation of a thank you. Sometimes they share their story with you, I do take a moment to give a specific response if possible.
I normally delete a lot of hate comments (politics, spam and such), but I still keep comments of those who criticize and try to give a response if possible.
not sure but I know of some online ones that you can test out ideas. I think its called https://dotnetfiddle.net/ I do think it supports linq but could be wrong.
though I dont quite work with querying the Databases as much anymore ( last time I actually ran a query… I hung entire VolksWagon database ) crashing databases by running recursive inner joins with non indexed fields was my speciality! Thankfully now I work on designing secure table structures and trying to protect the data before it goes in one lol
Ah that’s cool, I’m a software engineer myself. There’s always seemed to be a lot of people who are engineers and also musicians. I wonder if it’s not a coincidence!
thanks for caring.
