Audio/music basics-
People don't care about music any more. Although they will watch/listen to just about any thing on YouTube, regardless of video or audio quality.
Case in point- my live recordings of Daedelus from March 2012 and March 2013.
The 2012 (audio only) recording has been available as an audio stream on my Mixcloud page for about three months. It's high quality, professionally recorded, mixed and mastered audio, comparable to any proper live album you've heard over the years. Daedelus himself has promoted the recording on his FB page, and as of today it has just over 50 listens.
The 2013 recording is of the same high quality audio, and even though the songs performed are different than the 2012 show, generally speaking it's the same show. The big difference is that this newer recording is accompanied by the video of the performance as well as the audio. It's up on YouTube, and Daedelus promoted it the exact same way he promoted the Mixcloud recording a year ago, and the video has accumulated over 400 views in 24 hours.
Of course, I don't expect that pace to continue, but it pretty much crystalizes my suggestion that people will check out videos on YouTube much more readily than they'll listen to audio/music without some video to accompany it.
Lesson learned- if you're me and record pretty much nothing but live albums, I wouldn't even bother do all the work to produce the recording without video, because next to nobody will take the time to listen to it. From now on, I'm not going to make any live recordings without video.
Perhaps one day I'll do an experiment where I'll put up the audio on Mixcloud and the video on YouTube of the same show and see what the response is.
Lesson for bands- I see a whole lotta Soundcloud tracks with thousands and thousands of plays, and that's impressive. But it makes me wonder what their play count would be if that same track was a video on YouTube. I make some original music as well, and (if I want anybody to hear it) I don't think I'm gonna consider putting it up anywhere other than YouTube with some video of something, even just a montage of random shots of nothing in particular.
(Unless I actually try to make any money from selling the mp3s, in which case I'll head to Bandcamp, but I think we all know that selling mp3s these days is a laughable proposition.)
If you're interested, here are the Daedelus recordings-
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