YouTube Shorts Best Practices for Independent Artists

With 50 BILLION views a day, YouTube Shorts is a great place for artists (or labels, too!) to grow their audience. To ensure your videos perform the best they can, YouTube sent us some best practices to help you out. Here’s what we know…

YouTube Shorts Best Practices for Independent Artists

Hype Up Release Week

The week of your new release is an exciting and critical time! Giving your fans a chance to join in on the excitement is a great way to build hype and increase streams when the day comes. With YouTube Shorts, you can do this by posting behind the scenes clips, inside looks or tell them where they can pre-save and stream.

Catch Their Attention

Short form content is all about grabbing the attention of your viewers as quickly as possible. You can do this by adding text on screen, hosting a Q&A, doing a collaboration with another great artist and using the all other great features the app has to offer.

Be Relatable

One of the best ways to connect with your fans is to create content that they can relate to. For example, you can make videos of you reacting to your favorite songs, hopping on a popular trend, sharing a funny life experience and more. Anything you truly enjoy, others will enjoy, too.

Use YouTube Shorts’ Built-in Tools

Like TikTok, YouTube Shorts have their own built in creation tools you can use to help elevate your videos. Features like the green screen effect, the align tool for seamless transitions, filters and more are all there to help you make the best videos you can. Adding features like these make your videos more engaging, which snags the attention of your viewers and keeps them there for the long-run.

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Remix It Up

If you’re an artist with a bunch of videos sitting in your archives, you can reuse these to showcase your old catalog, performances and previous album releases. You can even take clips from old music videos and repost them as Shorts. Even better, take behind-the-scenes footage and mash them up into a whole new video for your fans to get an inside look they can’t get anywhere else.

In Conclusion…

Big names like The 1975 and Shakira have used YouTube Shorts to engage with their fans by hyping up upcoming releases, sharing clips from their music videos, clips from interviews, lyric videos and so much more. There’s no reason you can’t do the same and find great success! With these best practices, you can promote your music and connect with your fans on a whole new platform and expand your reach even further.

In the meantime, check out YouTube’s official best practices video below…

Good luck!