Hey folks, been a while.
Something curious happened today. I was listening to some painfully slow metal. Today has been hot, like really hot. I was sweating gallons with my blood pressure below my feet, so my brain didn't want anything complicated to process. Something to channel this whole groggy, like-somebody-had-beaten-me-with-a-rusty-iron-pole feeling.
I decided to type "atmospheric funeral doom metal" in the Youtube search bar to see what I'd find. You know, uplifting, cheery stuff. First video on the list: something I made 5 years ago on my old, now inactive account KK Slider. I look up the views count: nearly 40'000.
Granted I almost completely forgot about it, since I no longer go back to my old account, that was still pretty surprising. There was even a following of people I didn't know about. And the second video, the "sequel" to that one had over 18'000 views. Now, for comparison's sake, my current Youtube channel has a total amount of 16'000 views, more or less. So... how did I get all those folks in a 5 year time?
I thought it was because of the title. Youtube tags videos based on their title, so something with "Atmospheric Funeral Doom Metal" automatically becomes a search pool for similar searches. FDM is also a fairly uncommon niche genre with a pretty devoted, cult following. I guess the stars just aligned like that.
So now I am really torn. I have been against the use of genre names - unless I am really forced to because of a stupid rule that won't otherwise allow me to upload anything (I'm looking at you, Audiojungle), simply because they don't mean anything, it's just a categorization pretty much exploited by critics, labels and the industry to make more money and divide fanbases around the world. Hell, even the definition of "music" is entirely subjective. I have always wanted to compose music to encourage thinking and inspire people to come up with their own interpretations and worlds. For my video titles, so far I've been using a [artist name] - [song title] format. Direct, for sure, though in terms of views ineffective due to the fact that I'm no superstar and therefore not many people search for the words "Forgotten Dawn" as they would search, say, "really cute kitty". I'm not a really cute kitty.
Therefore, I am asking your thoughts about it. What do you think would be best to do in this scenario? Leaving things how they are and pray that people will come, or adding genre tags to my video titles?
Here's the poll: http://www.strawpoll.me/10723166
Feel free to leave a comment and stay tuned.
//FD
Oh, and here's the almost-40K views video.