Of course, not all of your subscribers will watch all of your videos, but they will at least see them in their subscription feed. Unlike views, subscribers are a totally solid metric. You see the result of this all the time when bands that get a viral hit on YouTube just disappear after a few weeks.Ī subscriber, on the other hand, is someone who has asked to stay in the loop they want to receive a notification in their subscription feed every time you upload a new video. So with that in mind, a view is often just a single touch point, and it’s very difficult to win someone over as a fan who will be interested in buying your music and supporting your career in just a few minutes. On that same note, even if someone watches the entire video, if they click off without subscribing, there is a very good chance they may never find your channel or your music ever again on this crowded platform. They could technically click off halfway through but still count as a “viewer.” So why aren’t views as valuable as they’re cracked up to be? First off, just because you got a “view” doesn’t mean that person watched all the way to the end of your video from start to finish. YouTube does have some algorithms set up to deter spammers and bots, but to keep things simple, a view is just when the page is hit and the video starts. So what exactly does a “view” mean on YouTube? Basically, views are simply the number of people who hit your video. This focus on views over subscribers is totally backward and will only end up holding you back. Bands that get hundreds of thousands of views are thrown into the spotlight for a few seconds of fame, but bands that build up an engaged base of 100,000 subscribers don’t get much attention.

The music industry seems to have a fascination with views. There are a lot of mistakes you can make on YouTube that will negatively affect your exposure, like incorrectly titling or tagging your videos or leaving the default thumbnail, but the number-one problem that holds most musicians back from actually finding success on YouTube is focusing on views instead of subscribers. YouTube is one of the biggest platforms for music and one of the top places people spend their time online, but it’s very difficult to stand out from the crowd. They get all excited, create some cool cover or original music videos and do some promotion, only to get discouraged with the apparent lack of interest from YouTube viewers as their first few covers fall on deaf ears and only get a few hundred views. The stories of indie artists making it big with a viral video on YouTube entice a lot of musicians to take the leap and set up a YouTube channel themselves. Photo by Markus Thorson via Flickr / CC BY 2.0

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