Source: Nielsen
YouTube is the world’s largest distributor of streaming music, and an important music-discovery platform. Does extreme YouTube music popularity (virality) boost music sales?
That’s a complicated question with many conflicting influences. It’s a research challenge that delivers correlation more easily than causation — that is, there might be a relationship between viral videos and upward sales of music in the videos, but it’s difficult to prove that the video directly caused people to buy music.
Nielsen has taken a stab at identifying the correlation. To clarify — a viral video in this study is one in which a YouTube uploader (not the music artist) created a video using an artist’s music. The most successful video on this exercise was of a wedding in which the wedding party danced down the aisle to a Chris Brown song (see the video below).
Nielsen examined viewership of viral YouTube videos, then tracked sales during four weeks after the video was posted. (There was, no doubt, a lot of wasted tracking when videos failed to go viral.) There is some uptick in each of the examples, but without persuasive connections between degree of virality and degree of uptick. The Chris Brown wedding video is connected to a 6% rise in sales, while another viral video (featuring Katy Perry music) that received a smaller share of 9.8-million views is correlated with a 64% in sales.
In the RAIN editorial office the phrase “hazy correlation” was mentioned in connection with the infographic Nielsen provided, and the haziness is unavoidable without diving into a survey of consumer behavior. Nielsen acknowledges that “a number of influences can drive song sales,” and that “recent trends suggest that viral videos can play a part.” The Katy Perry video caused the sales spike months after the music was released.
At least one artist directly attributes music sales to user-created viral videon on YouTube — Ryan Farish (see the RAIN interview here). Farish, who will appear at RAIN Summit Indy, estimates 40,000 YouTube video that use his music, while he himself has uploaded only about 40 promotional videos.