Music Videos ! Promote your Music the best way..

Hi and welcome to the "Music Videos" page, about how to promote youself and your music by using music videos.

About two years ago, when I just started my songwriting info website,I knew that video could be the used on a web-pages and that it would increase and more important in time. But I never could have guessed that this would happen so quickly.

The fact is,for me as well as for many others who are working on the Internet, I thought this development was great news.

So, I've created a sort of promotion corner, where I added Youtube (mostly) and Yahoo videos that I thought where worth while to add to my web site, and started with embedding music videos on my site as soon as possible.

After all, this was why I've started my web site in the first place. To help other music people with information, and now I can also give them a bit of (free) promotion.

Who are the New Players on the field? A bit of info.

You probably know who Myspace and Youtube are, but let me explain it one more time.

Myspace is a service website who provides free web-space to everyone . From old to young and whatever you are doing, you can start your Myspace.com page, and this for free.

It was ( and still is ) a gigantic success indeed, especially with bands and artists, for who it was meant to be in the first place.

To give free web space to bands and other artists in any field was a genius move ( and there must always be a first one, isn't it so)

Then Youtube appeared on the horizon.Youtube is a web site that exist mostly out of videos ( also music videos). They developed a smart idea to provide a easy uploading service so every person in the universe could have his or her video message to the rest of the world .It was an enormous success. I don't know their exact Alexa ranking ( 4 or 5) .

Video was going on a roller coaster.

A couple years ago it was all Myspace and Myspace again, the people where been talking about. Now , it's Youtube all around.

Silently, the two new players were conquering cyberspace, and they are the fastest growing site's still ( besides.the real giants google, yahoo and MSN But , they where all jumping together into video track, ( after they saw the Youtube success, of course). After a few years, Google let roll the muscles and bought YouTube for the small prize of $1,5 billion.

And so we come to the end of the Internet video history.

What can music videos, Youtube and all the others mean for you, the music people?

One thing's for sure, music videos are,undoubtedly, the ultimate promotion means, for bands, songwriters, and artists to showing their talents to the public and the whole world.

So..I've jumped on the video train too. Not that I add videos of myself to the services, but I'm always watching for the talented, and the quality... Sure it takes a lot of time to do some searching for quality music videos, but I really do think that it's worthwhile doing it.

For myself, the visitors and for you guys who are reading all this.

How to add videos to your web site?

Well, the easiest way to add videos to your site is uploading them through youtube, google video, or Yahoo video and embed them as a piece of HTML-code into your own site. As far as I can understand , Myspace videos can only add or played on Myspace pages ( the rules). (If you think I'm wrong, please tell me)

With google you need a special code to embed the videos. Yahoo and Youtube provide a code that you can copy and paste into your website.

A little note about video streaming. There are different types of video steaming, but the two main methods are steaming servers ( true streaming) and HTTP steaming.

But, in case you wish to add your own made home videos to your site and this ask some technical work, but the end result is that you have your own video site .What is great.

Of-course , the easiest way is through Youtube,Yahoo video Google video...But if they going out of business ( what's always a possibility), or doing some maintenance on their site, then too, you have no more videos to watch on your site .

Thats the disadvantage of working with Youtube, Yahoo or Google video.

If you really want to avoid problems, then the best thing to do is to add your own (or someone else's) videos on your site.

How we can do this, I shall try to do some explaining ...

First of all this..

There are two main types of video streaming and they are: Streaming servers and HTML streaming.

Also Video files located on the hard disk of your computer are in most cases much to big to embed into a website. , They have to made smaller,and this is called, the encoding of the files .

To to this you need to download some encoding device from the specific file formats:

Some you can download for free and others too, but for a small fee.

www.windowsmedia.com

www.realmedia.com

www.quicktime.com

www.MPEG-4.com

www.macromediaflash.com

www.quicktime.com
www.MPEG-4.com
www.macromediaflash.com

File formats!

Windows Media, RealMedia, QuickTime, MPEG-4,and Macormedia Flash, just to mention a few.

There are pros and cons for each format, but in the end it comes down to personnel preference. If you wish to add your own music videos ( and not Youtube,Yahoo,google..) then the best thing you can do to reach the widest possible audience is creating separate files for each format.

But in reality this isn't usually practical so you need to make a judgment call on which formats to provide. Obviously the better you understand all the options, the better your decision is likely to be.

There are three ways to view media on the Internet, and these are : Downloading and streaming.

Method 1: The downloading. When you download a music video file this will be saved on your computer which you then open and view. This has some advantages but has the big disadvantage of having to wait for the whole file to download before any of it can be viewed.

This can be too much of an inconvenience when it's about a smaller file, but when it comes to large files and long presentations it can be very off-putting. We all know that people ain't very patient , especially not the people on the Internet .

The easiest way to provide down-loadable music video files is to use a simple hyperlink to the file. A slightly more advanced method is to embed the file in a web page using a special HTML code.

Delivering video files this way is known as HTTP streaming or HTTP delivery. HTTP means Hyper Text Transfer Protocol , and is the same protocol used to deliver web pages.

For this reason it is easy to set up and use almost any web site, without requiring additional software or special hosting plans.

Method 2 the Streaming video

Streaming media works a bit differently - The end user can start watching the file almost as soon as it begins downloading. The file is sent to the user in a constant stream, and the user watches it as it arrives.

The obvious advantage with this method is that there is no waiting involved. Streaming media has additional advantages such as being able to broadcast live events, like you where watching a television program. This is called a web-cast or net-cast.

Method 3: Progressive Downloading

In this method the video clip is downloaded but begins playing as soon as a portion of the file has been received. It's look like true streaming , but doesn't have all the advantages.

And so we come to the end of this article, with the question. What method will you use-on you web site.

True, it all sounds complicated, especially for people who haven't got a web site yet. But, video is the Internet future and if you thinking about starting a site yourself you have to consider how or what videos you will use on your site.

Of course , the easiest way is to embed Youtube, Yahoo, Google URL code and copy past them into your web pages or your HTML e-mail. It's easy and fast done. There are disadvantages, as I have mentioned earlier.

So we've come to the end of this article, and I surely hopes that you learned something about adding music videos to your site, and about all the other things I've mentioned too.

Believe me when I tell you that video on the net is of a growing importance on the Internet.

This article has already been published in one of my newsletters, but as all things change.. I thought it would be usefully to add it as a web page. Where,if necessary, I can up-date it .

Thanks for your visit and hope you'll visit us often..

The Webmaster
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