When you upload a video to YouTube you have the option to add music. CD Baby and probably others provide music to this list. When the YouTuber uses one of your tunes you get paid a tiny bit. This money comes from the ad revenue.
Also, if a video already has my music on it by some bizarre happening then YouTube detects that track based on the list CD Baby provided. I get money for that too.
There is no “follow through” on my part from my YouTube channel or anything else except for having my music on CD Baby.
Classification means genre and mood. “Bluesy”, “acoustic guitar”, “moody”, “exciting”, etc. it’s the same way a music supervisor would find your music for a scene.
The quarterly sync royalty report from CD Baby does not name the YouTube videos that use my music. Only that YouTube paid for x number of uses of a certain track.
To put this into perspective YouTube has so many videos that a number like 8,000 videos is not even a drop in the bucket. If those 8,000 videos got only 1,000 plays each there’s your 8,000,000. It could be that 8,000,000 videos got made about how bad my music is and each got played once.
I’ve also spent a lot of time trying to figure out which of my tracks do the best. There is no rhyme or reason to it. I originally thought there was a name recognition confusion that was helping me. I have hard evidence that that is not the case but I don’t want to get into that.
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