Making money from youtube doing music covers.

[jRad]

Some background:

I play acoustic and sing. I've had my youtube account since 2009. I've never really put any thought into making money with it. I've recently enabled ad-sense on my videos and am making cash (very little, like 10 cents a day). I want to make more money via YouTube. I've accumulated 700,000 legit hits, but in order to make decent cash I need WAY more (per video).

My plan is this: to upload one video a week (every Wednesday), of a brand new song released by any mainstream artist. Reason being.. newer the song, the more hot the keyword is.

Now here's my question. I understand that keywords within the title and tag play a big role. I'm not sure if they do in the description as well, love to find out the truth behind that. Anyways. I want to share my current strategy with gaining views. This is what I've came up with so far. I haven't done a cover of this song, but let's take Rihanna's "We Found Love" song and figure out ways how to get on the first page (preferably in the top 3 spots):

- Title: We Found Love (Cover) - Rihanna
- Description: A short description about the song. Repeating keywords a couple times. IE, "Hey all. Here's my acoustic cover of we found love by Rihanna. Hope you enjoy the cover." I usually put my soundcloud, facebook and twitter link in here as well.
- Tags: I determine the tags by typing 'we found love cover' and then hitting the space bar into the search field. If you go to Youtube and try this, you'll see that "we found love cover acoustic", "we found love cover boyce avenue", and lastly "we found love cover rihanna" are the top three hits. I'll do an alteration of these keywords, but I basically stack these types of keywords (specific to the song) in the tag section. Also, I use quotes when putting tags together. Instead of typing... we found love cover... in the tags section, I'll put "we found love cover" (quotes included) instead. I've heard this works better. Is that correct?

To me, my strategy seems like I'd get thousands upon thousands of hits. People barely 'dislike' any of my videos. I get 95% great feedback. I'm packing my tags, titles and descriptions with good keywords.

So why am I not getting ten's of thousands of hits consistently?

Anyway. Even after doing all this for other videos, they're still not ranking even just on the first page. I was wondering if I was missing something in regards to getting a higher ranking.

Thanks a bunch in advance.

[paulgl]

Youtube covers are copyright infringement unless you
have paid for the rights.

It is no matter that others play them, get away with it,
etc.

Hard to believe that google approved any videos of you
doing copyrighted songs.

You are in danger of losing your youtube account, adsense, etc.

But, we've played this record before...

Not to mention that you could be sued by Rihanna and
her record label.

Paul

[jRad]

Originally Posted by paulgl

Youtube covers are copyright infringement unless you
have paid for the rights.

It is no matter that others play them, get away with it,
etc.

Hard to believe that google approved any videos of you
doing copyrighted songs.

You are in danger of losing your youtube account, adsense, etc.

But, we've played this record before...

Not to mention that you could be sued by Rihanna and
her record label.

Paul

That's weird. I can name countless youtube channels that do covers of songs, have adsense, and also make the covered songs downloadable on itunes. They're making serious, serious profit off covering other people's songs.. and they've had nothing done to them. Not to mention some of these channels have accumulated millions upon millions of hits.

In regards to my OP, does anyone have any other ways I can better rank my videos? Much appreciated.

[JSProjects]

There's a ton of covers on YT and I doubt they really care. As far as making money with your covers, that's a little tricky since "technically" it's copyrighted content. (Right?)

[jRad]

Originally Posted by JSProjects

There's a ton of covers on YT and I doubt they really care. As far as making money with your covers, that's a little tricky since "technically" it's copyrighted content. (Right?)

If you youtube Tyler Ward for example, he'll cover a song (putting his own spin on it), and then take the audio from that video, selling it on itunes.

The guy has millions of hits and I'm sure makes decent coin from selling covered tracks on itunes.

[rob1123]

If you want to to get more hits to your youtube videos you can build bank links to them so they appear in the seps.

As far as making money from them I suppose you can sell them through iTunes etc.

[paulgl]

I knew that would happen.

Let me repeat:

It matters not that others get away with it.

Period.

Plenty of people get their videos banned daily.

That's the first step to your account being banned,
youtube and adsense.

But...we've heard this record many, many, many times before...

You see tons of covers on youtube only by the sheer reason
that not many companies are militant. But some are.

You do not own the song, and performing it on youtube is
indeed copyright infringement. Your personal performance
is yours, but not the song. And there's the rub.

This is just a sampling of the many, many people who have
them removed.
http://www.google.com/support/forum/...32acc7f5&hl=en

The excuse that everybody does it, is not an excuse.

So go on with your bad selves. Who cares, right?

Paul

[Mark Olson]

For selling your covers on itunes (or offering a free download) it is easy to set up a mechanical license via rightsflow.com. You have to pay about 9 cents per download. That's how people who sell covers on itunes do it.

In order to use adsense on your video you have to get a sync license directly from the publishing company for each song.

[NewYorkerRocks]

Youtube has been banning a lot of accounts, so please take great care before doing anything big.