YouTube Music Loudspeaker
Amplifying labels’ and artists’ priority songs across YouTube surfaces 🎉
Role
Design Lead
Date
2023
Challenge
Promotional tooling within the music industry is a table stakes item (see Spotify, Amazon, Tiktok). To maintain relevance within the music ecosystem from a promotional standpoint, YouTube must provide products that maximize an artist’s ability to showcase their content across a multitude of YouTube surfaces, while providing the performance feedback required to relay how the content is performing.
Solution
Loudspeaker 1.0 is a promotional hub that enables Labels/Distributors to highlight their priority content to be utilized as a signal for potential placement across YouTube surfaces. Loudspeaker 1.0 is the building block for future enhancements that will build the product into a true promotional hub.
The Context
Today, music labels pitch new music to YouTube Music playlists…
This helps populate these great premium experiences. The legacy Pitch Tool is the only way for Content Owners and Labels to submit music for programming consideration and is limited to playlists.
But, music promotion today goes far beyond playlists…
Labels and partners expect multi-channel promotion tools (Shorts audio picker, YouTube Charts website, Living Room, Featured Shelves, Programmed playlists, Creator Music, youtube/music, etc). We have an opportunity to enhance the non-paid promotional experience for our music partners, building high-functioning promotional tooling for artists, labels, and their teams with the goal of bridging multi-format content with YT’s 2B users across a plethora of surfaces in the most impactful way.
The Opportunity
Pitch Tool—a limited and manual experience
The legacy pitch tool was a very manual process that labels and content owners had to manually submit music sheet documents via a Google drive folder in order to be considered for placement on playlists by YouTube’s Music Programming team.
Additionally, this interface was clunky, difficult to understand, and only operated on a weekly submission cadence (which is a huge limitation in certain music markets that operate in a daily pitch cycle). Pitch Tool is also only accessible by labels and content owners—creating an inequity for only music that is signed with a label to be pitched.
It does not drive operational efficiency in the music promotion process.
Loudspeaker—a path towards a full service promotional hub
Loudspeaker 1.0 is a promotional hub that enables Labels/Distributors (and eventually Artists/independent artists) to highlight their priority content to be utilized as a signal for potential placement across YT featured shelves, carousels, and programmed playlists.
As YouTube takes a more multi-format approach, Loudspeaker will enable Partners to pitch across more surfaces supporting more discovery for roughly 2 billion fans consuming across formats.
Loudspeaker 1.0 is the building block for future enhancements that will build the product into a true promotional hub.
Loudspeaker enables operational efficiency and holistic utility for industry partners
Drive multi-format, multi-surface music promotion with the ability to pitch various music content types (Previews, New Releases, Catalog, Re-Issued, etc.) across promotional surfaces on YouTube, including Programmed Playlists, Shorts Featured Section, and new surfaces in the future
Submit their pitches more efficiently and improve pitch velocity via the ability to submit content more efficiently with a new submission flow and by utilizing bulk edit and submission
Pitch at their convenience: releases are often shifting in real time. With draft state, partners can input information as it comes, before submitting their final pitch
Schedule pitches with more flexibility, supporting 24-hour release cycles vs the previous inflexible weekly pitch windows
Get real-time reporting on placements, helping close the information loop back to artists, managers, and industry
The Pitch Experience
“As a label or artist, I want to promote a new release”
Loudspeaker users are greeted with an intuitive UX compared with the legacy tool. They can easily edit promotion details and save whenever they like—enabling users to come back later when more promotion details are figured out with their team.
Loudspeaker enables an easy pitch process by allowing labels to easily populate the tool with content they own. With an “add to cart” functionality, they can select multiple songs to add (across artists they manage) if they want. For individual artists, they search from their entire catalog which makes pitching super user-friendly.
“As a label or artist, I want to bulk edit or bulk submit multiple drafts”
When a content owner or label is promoting content, they may batch songs that have similar promotion details like genre, date, surface, territory, or priority. Allowing bulk actions like editing or bulk submission greatly adds to operational efficiency and streamlines their workflows.
“As a label or artist, I want to see if my submitted pitches were successful”
With the previous Pitch Tool, once labels/content owners submitted a music sheet to SPMs or YouTube’s programming team, they would have to wait for a manual outreach of if their songs were places on a playlist or not. If they were placed, it would be a manual process to know where it was placed and they would have to go searching for those playlists.
With Loudspeaker, content owners can check on the status of their submissions at anytime. If their submissions were placed, hovering over the badge will reveal a tooltip of where the song has been placed across the different YouTube surfaces and dates that the placement started. If there were any placements on playlists, direct links will be accessible for them to view directly.
What’s next?
Placement Reporting
The next step to meet the need of the industry is to give more robust performance/placement reporting on their pitch submissions. Once the song is placed, the will be allowed to see where the song was placed and how YouTube’s Loudspeaker is benefitting them by showing them performance uplift metrics in song views, Shorts creations, and Shorts views. This is a valuable feature that utilizes YouTube’s unique reach of 2 billion fans to give confidence and visibility to labels/artists.
Beyond 1.0 — building upon the extensible tooling
Along with UI enhancements (duplicating drafts/submissions and trash/trash retrieval), we will continue to scale Loudspeaker integrations, by building new Featured Surfaces across YouTube to amplify promotional impact while continuing to stay fully aligned with YouTube principles.
The Outcome
“As part of our long-term trusted partnership, we are thrilled to have joined hands with YouTube as early testers of LoudSpeaker, which will facilitate and reinforce audience development and promotion of Believe artists and labels on the platform. This collaboration is a testament to our joined commitment to build the most relevant and efficient tools for artists to grow and engage their audiences and we look forward to continuing to accompany YouTube in the process.”
“Getting comfortable with Loudspeaker and it’s awesome so far! Much more seamless than the previous pitch tool. ”
“I used Loudspeaker this morning for my pitches and it was AMAZING! Great, smooth interface. Made the whole pitching experience so much quicker. Go YouTube!”
“Was a great user friendly experience overall... Shaves off time from pitching, easier to pitch across territories.”
“This is a critical tool for our artists and industry partners and the potential it has to impact other promotional opportunities across YT is immense.”
Why does this matter?
This foundational work benefits partners, artists, and helps users discover great new music
This launch solves a long standing gap with a music promotion tool that's impactful, aligned with YouTube principles, and built to be extensible across new use cases and YT surfaces in the future.
Incoming placement submissions has already increased 20% upon launch
Latency improvements and efficiency of work flow is 50x faster than with Pitchtool