I doubt YT views show much of anything.
We have no idea how many people make up those views, since one person could watch it 10 times. We don’t know how much of it they watched. Maybe they turned off after a minute. Maybe they hated it. So a million views just says that. It was viewed to some extent that many times. Doesn’t mean a band has a ton of fans.
Well you actually do know all of that via youtube analytics. And it would be a odd if the people who have money involved aren't analyzing that data. Google has sooo much data if you look for it.
and I just checked my own channel, for this specific example I can see the average times a person viewed any given video, How many unique viewers, where they are located, view duration, do they watch another video, where did they come from to find the video, so much data.
Totally, I was more responding to the idea that they have a lot of views and therefor they are doing very well. From our perspective, all we see is the final number. I'm sure the band is well aware of everything.
Well, I don't think anyone here said that. But the fact that they get millions of views surely is not a bad sign. There are many projects/videos from popular artists that get way less attention online.
Surprising to see that Goodbye Divinity has 1,1 million views on YouTube already. Good for them, but I can't help but wonder what caused that spike this time around. I listened to it twice and was underwhelmed enough to not make that thrice until I have the album in my hands.
Coming home hit 1 million views fairly quickly too. The guys have a lot of fans around the world who will and have checked it out.
They are actually doing very well on at least yt for this type of music. Some of the Plovdiv live clips have hundreds of thousands of views as well. And Coming Home is at 3 million now even.
Might look good on paper but I don't understand how that translates into meaningful revenue.
Well, I wasn't talking about revenue, just that their online numbers are good.
But going into that, I know these days you need merch at concerts for revenue. But doing well at social media at the very least means people are listening to your material and that you can reach an audience to promote your material. Translating to ticket sales is difficult, but these days merch is also a big online bussines, but maybe not in metal. Furthermore, using youtube analytics they should be able to determine where there is the most interest. If a big chunk from the views come from a certain country/location, they could decide to focus on building an audience there.
It is clear that at the very least in the US they aren't happy and the promoters are not excited too. Hopefully they find a way to find their spot.
That does make some sense to analyze where the fan base might be and target accordingly but as other have said how trustworthy are the numbers that would be used?
As far as the US goes, that's a big problem for many bands. It's not limited to just Sons of Apollo. The US doesn't seem to be a very gig friendly place unless you are crazy huge and have a verifiable track record. It hasn't been for a while not but apparently this problem seems to be getting bigger.
I don't know if (metal) bands/promoters use these metrics, but I do know in this day and age youtube/social media analytics are used for a variety of marketing purposes, and depending on the data, there might be some valuable insights. If it really is a bunch of fans watching the same video over and over for years, then (to a degree) the data will show that. If there is a large spike in some area, perhaps due to word of mouth or algorithms, then that could potentially be tracked with data.
There are many factors such as, view duration (people who hate it are more likely to turn it off), audience retention (people who like it are more likely to watch their other material as well), re-watches, engagement (comments, other interactions, the overall tone of these), types of audiences and overlap with other audiences (for a large overlap a co-tour can be considered, for example). Typically a combination of these factors can be used to profile potential consumers.
In the end, nothing is for certain, the world is far to complex to boil down to some assumptions based on a couple of metrics, but I would not underestimate the applications of internet analytics either. It is increasingly how this world is operating.