Tracking your band’s popularity across Youtube, blogs and social networks

Bands using YouTube to promote their live videos might be interested in using a free tool called Youtube Insight, which gives them detailed statistics for the videos they upload. With this service, you can see who is viewing your material, where they are located, and when they log on to see it. You can also figure out how long it takes your videos to reach their popularity cap, and what happens to video views as their popularity peaks. All in all, it allows bands to see where their music-exporting efforts are yielding results, and to target their audience more effectively.

To access the tool, go to the right hand column of the video list in the ‘My Videos’ section of your profile and click on the ‘About This Video’ link. This will take you to a graph measuring the number of views and the popularity of your content. You’ll also  see a  map showing you the regions where your content is most popular. (See image below)

In the same vein we have DashGo, a web based service that allows content producers to distribute their content across music stores and social media sites from a single dashboard. In addition, Dashgo comes with a series of analytics tools that users can use to get detailed info on how the public is reacting to their content on the different platforms. Users can then adapt their distribution according to where they sell best.

If you are serious about your online sales and distribution outlets, stats and analytics tools can be helpful; you might be surprised to know that your band’s got a small community in Finland, or that some New Zealand chap linked back to your website from his blog – you could then proceed to contact these people and start some pro-active networking in those areas. And unless they’re plummeting, stats are fun to look at. StatCounter is a extremely cool free statistics tool that tracks a great deal of your web activity. We use it on our blog in addition to the wordpress.com stats. You can use this type of information in many ways and be creative about it.
Of course your music is where you creativity should shine the most (remember the Please Buy My Record: The Futility Of Flogging Music article posted right before – Don’t let these tools take over !)

MRUFFFF !