The news arrived last week and we are all very excited. After seven years of negotiations, GEMA & YouTube finally reached an agreement. As of November 1st, 2016, all music videos controlled by GEMA have been switched on and are being monetised effective immediately. The terms of the agreement have not been disclosed, but this is obviously great news as Germany is a key market in Europe.
This opens up a number of opportunities in the territory, from UGC and premium content monetisation to channel partnership. Here are some things we recommend you to do to take full advantage of these developments:
Spread the Word
Even though this is big news, fans might not be as in-the-know regarding updates to complicated publishing deals in foreign territories as those of us in the industry. So get them excited about it! Create playlists on your channel that are easy to share across social media posts to your fans. Give them a packaged collection of your top videos and re-release this content to a previously untapped audience. You could even get a digital advertising campaign behind it to target that region specifically.
Translate Your Channel and Videos
YouTube recently added improved support for making your content available across multiple languages. With a new German audience available to you, you’ll want to make sure you’re speaking their language. You can add translations to your channel info, playlists, sections and video titles and descriptions. Providing translations for your channel and videos will make it easier for German fans to locate your content, but also helps YouTube surface videos in search. Now, we’re not suggesting that you blindly translate all of your content to German. You should first find out if you have engaged fans in the territory and which types of videos they enjoy, which brings us to our next tip.
Locate Your Audience
By using YouTube Analytics, you can see exactly how many views are coming from Germany to see how these recent updates might impact your channel. You can sort almost any report in YouTube analytics by territory. Just click the “Geography” button below the graphs and it will show your current data set sorted by territory. For example, the image below shows views and watch time sorted by territory and you can clearly see that Germany makes up 5.8% of this channel’s audience. You can even check if those translations we mentioned earlier are working out by visiting the new “Translations” section of YouTube Analytics.
If you are a German label, this is the perfect time for you to jump on board our video network, which currently counts over 2,400 partner channels for a total of 20 million subscribers worldwide. You will also have a team of music video experts at your service. Interested? Talk to your client rep.
