How to get your music featured on the biggest YouTube channels
YouTube has changed the way people listen to music in a big way. It’s a major player when it comes to music consumption alongside other major streaming services like Spotify and Soundcloud.
There’s a whole load of hungry music fans who use YouTube to keep up with the latest sounds. And there’s a new wave of influencers on the lookout to uncover new music and share it with their audience.
In this article we’re going to delve into the world of YouTube music promotion. Helping you understand why you need to focus on it, how to find the channels in your genre and how to reach out to them to get your music shared.
What are YouTube music promotion channels?
These channels exist for the purposes of sharing music videos with their audience. They tend to focus on specific genres of music and upload songs from a variety of artists on a regular basis.
Quite often these channels have started out as a one man operation – people looking to share music with their friends and other enthusiasts – but over time they have grown to become major players in the industry – with some even becoming record labels based off the success of their YouTube channels alone.
Nowadays there’s a whole spectrum of channels to choose from. If you’re looking for a channel in your genre with millions of subscribers, or just thousands, there’s no doubt you’ll be able to find them.
Why are they worth targeting?
It’s simple – the ability to reach an engaged audience of people interested in your genre of music.
These channels can help expose your music to a new audience who may not have heard of you before, and they also have the ability to cause a ripple effect throughout YouTube and other platforms.
We’ve seen many instances where getting a music video on one channel has helped put an artist on the radar of other channels and opened new doors to them.
You need to be realistic with who you choose to target though. You’re not going to jump straight on to the major channels straight away – you’ll often need to work your way up by building relationships with smaller channels to start with.
Don’t underestimate this approach – every channel started small to begin with. And don’t forget that these channels are also looking to grow.
Build good relationships with smaller influencers today, and they may well be running some of the larger channels on YouTube in a few years time.
How to find these channels and contact them
The best way to get to find these channels is to get on YouTube yourself and start getting a feel for what’s going on in your channel.
YouTube can be a bit of a rabbit hole – once you’re on a song you’re presented with a whole load of other recommended music videos which makes it very easy to find more and more related songs and channels.
We’d suggest you use this approach as a great starting point to locating channels that may be suitable.
To show you how this process works let’s go through an example.
Say we’re a house music producer looking to promote our track. We’re looking for an artist that hasn’t quite broken through to the mainstream but has a similar sound to ours and is making good traction.
In this instance we’ve chose the the track ‘What I know’ by Dallerium.
A search on this track on YouTube reveals a list of all the channels that have uploaded this track. You can see the channels highlighted in yellow on the results below:
Scrolling down this list you will see a wide range of channels, with a wide range of subscriber counts.
If we take the ‘Thrills’ channel as an example, visiting their page we can get an idea of the amount of subscribers:
This can help you determine the size of the channel and also the amount of submissions they receive.
The next step would be to visit the ‘About’ page on their channel to get an idea of what sort of music they share, and also the best way to contact them.
On this about page we can see that Thrills is a house music blog and features all types of house subgenres. We can also get all the information required to send submissions to them.
Repeat this process for a few different songs and you’ll start to build a database of channels suited to your genre to get submitting your tracks to.
Using the Dallerium example above we were able to find a whole load of potential channels to reach out to in just a few minutes, all with a wide range of subscriber counts:
What to look for in a channel
It’s worth being selective when it comes to what channels you submit to. One thing we would always check is activity – make sure the channels that you are submitting to are active. This is as simple as checking the upload history and making sure they have been consistently uploading music videos.
How to submit your music to YouTube channels
Finding channels to promote to is the easy part, actually getting your track onto them is the difficult bit. But there are some things you can do to vastly increase your chances of a successful submission.
Quality
First and foremost, you need to make sure the quality of your music is on par. We know that everyone starts somewhere, but any channel worth getting on is going to have some level of quality control.
It goes without saying – but you should only be putting out final versions of your work.
When starting out you need to expect rejection. This is all part of the process.
By honing your craft and ensuring you only put out your best work you’ll have a much better success rate when it comes to getting exposure.
So assuming you’ve got the quality side of things covered, let’s look at some of the other things to do to make it easier for these channels to feature you.
Keep your pitch short and sweet
These channels have to work their way through a lot of submissions. You can make their life easier by keeping your pitch short and sweet.
Include all the info they need to review the track in a friendly way, without being too overbearing or telling them how much it would mean to you to get featured on their channel.
How hard you worked to create the track, or how much you want to get exposure makes little difference to you being posted. It’s more likely to detract from your overall pitch.
You’re better off letting the music doing the talking.
Provide a streaming link
Make it easy for them to listen to the song straight away. If it’s difficult to listen to a song straight away most promoters won’t go through the process of listening.
Provide a download link – HQ
Make sure you also provide a link to the download location of the high quality version of the song should they choose to share it.
Provide relevant info and track bio – social media links etc
Some channels like to include a short bio about the tracks they put on their channels. Adding in a small amount of info about the track and the artist that they can use can be helpful.
Offer exclusives or premieres
Channels love exclusives when they can get them. But you need to keep in mind that you can obviously only offer this to one channel, so you need to factor in the benefits that being featured on that one channel would offer vs being posted on multiple channels.
If you know that one channel is going to make a big impact it may be worth it.
Credentials
It can be helpful to put in some credentials in the pitch. If your track has been featured on other platforms, or gained good PR coverage it may help your efforts.
Allow copyright
This is a tricky area, and one that a lot of channels find themselves dealing with on a regular basis.
If you can allow copyright on your music it not only de-risks the channel from getting flagged up by YouTube, but also allows them to run adverts at the start of the videos.
If you’re at the stage where exposure is the only concern, allowing copyright can help make your track look much more appealing.
Get Started
So there we have it – a guide to finding YouTube channels in your genre and how to reach out to them. All you need to do now is get started.
To help you get going we’ve put together some of the biggest channels in each genre below – this is a list in progress, so if there’s any others you feel are worthy of adding to the list let us know and we’ll get them added.
Don’t forget that music submission doesn’t end with YouTube – there’s plenty of other places you can be sending your music to and once you’re up on YouTube, don’t forget your music video marketing strategy.
Good luck!
Some of the biggest players in each genre
General
MrSuicideSheep
Subscribers: 9,560,979
One of the biggest channels on YouTube, uploads a wide range of electronic music.
MajesticCasual
Subscribers: 3,942,340
Large channel that uploads a wide range of music. Leans towards original, artistic sounds and away from commercial music.
SOUNDISSTYLE
Subscribers: 370,336
Electronic, hip-hop, house, indie, and other genres. Leans towards more downtempo music.
Underground Charisma
Subscribers: 264,034
Focuses on lesser known artists, leans towards electronic music.
Wave Music
Subscribers: 1,394,108
Wave music is dedicated to chill trap, electronic pop, melodic dubstep, future bass, indie dance, melodic bass, and the chiller side of EDM!
Stay See
Subscribers: 665,697
Channel focusing on music promotion for chilled electronic and deep sounds.
House / EDM
Lithuania HQ
Subscribers: 844,061
A large house music focused channel that has helped promote and grow some of the newest artists.
House Music HD
Subscribers: 427,979
Channel that promotes the modern House Music with genres such as Deep / Future / G – House & More
Lucid Plain
Subscribers: 245,842
Dedicated to promoting and sharing the best fresh music and helping the artists/labels increase their audience.
MrDeepSense
Subscribers: 909,627
Channel dedicated to promotion of Deep House, Nu Disco and House music combined with magnificent artworks from professional photographers.
GalaxyMusic
Subscribers: 776,538
Focuses on dance music, electro, house, dubstep & more.
Proximity
Subscribers: 7,054,043
One of the biggest channels out there specialising in EDM.
Diversity
Subscribers: 763,507
Large channel with subchannels for different genres. Mainly focused on a wide variety of dance music.
AirwaveMusicTv
Subscribers: 1,185,674
This channel promotes a wide range of electronic styles.
Trap
TrapNation
Subscribers: 21,340,734
The biggest music promotion channel on YouTube, with a range of smaller sub channels as part of the family.
TrapMusicHDTV
Subscribers: 5,126,640
Another large channel that’s part of a YouTube network.
Trap City
Subscribers: 10,753,752
Part of the ‘City’ family. Promotes the best and newest Trap music.
Dubstep
UKF Dubstep
Subscribers: 6,267,632
Spawned from the original UKF channel, UKF dubstep has grown to be one of the biggest dubstep channels on YouTube.
DubstepGutter
Subscribers: 3,423,147
A great source of dubstep, drumstep, glitch hop, hybrid music.
Drum and Bass
Raving Panda
Subscribers: 16,186
Less well known as some of the other channels, but a great source for DnB promotion.
Ledge Sounds
Subscribers: 25,936
Focuses more on Liquid DnB.
The Dub Rebellion
Subscribers: 377,606
Heavier sounds – focus on DnB and Dubstep.
Liquicity
Subscribers: 704,092
Veteran of DnB promotion on YouTube, promoting some of the freshest artists.
UKF
Subscribers: 2,073,538
One of the oldest YouTube music channels, uploads a blend of more well known artists combined with up and comers.
Chill
ChillNation
Subscribers: 5,206,826
A sister channel to Trap Nation, uploads have a more laid back sound.
CloudKid
Subscribers: 2,240,942
A mix of melodic tracks from around the globe.
CloudCity
Subscribers: 443,896
Chilled music, new song and remixes from upcoming artists.
Hip Hop & Rap
Beats and Culture
Subscribers: 59,855
More chilled hip hop, not your standard hip hop.
ChillHop
Subscribers: 1,627,194
Promotes the best and newest in Jazzy and Lofi Hip Hop.
RapNation
Subscribers: 2,192,914
Another sister channel to Trap Nation focusing on Rap Music.
Rock
Montage Rock
Subscribers: 512,385
Provides uncopyrighted rock music for use in creative projects.
Spaceuntravel
Subscribers: 512,385
Focuses on alternative rock and alternative metal.
RockCentralHQ
Subscribers: 14,144
Channel promoting general rock music.
Indie
IndieCurrent
Subscribers: 149,120
Blog and YouTube channel that focuses on independent music
Koala Kontrol
Subscribers: 1,203,599
Large subscriber account YouTube channel that focuses on Indie Electronic, Indie, Alternative audiovisual music curator
Alexrainbird
Subscribers: 446,553
Focuses on independent pop, folk and rock music.
Indie Air
Subscribers: 867,476
Focuses on a wide range of indie music.
Vertex
Subscribers: 16,214
Focuses on the best indie and alternative music by up-and-coming artists
