Social media engagements of music videos on YouTube’s official artist channels

Abstract

As social platforms become essential in promoting songs, many artists create an official channel on YouTube and encourage their fans’ engagements. However, little is known about the effectiveness of official videos in generating fans’ media engagements. We conduct two empirical studies to investigate the relationship between official video attributes, media engagements and channel subscribers. First, we propose a model to explain how music video attributes facilitate the relative social media engagements of a video. Second, we test whether three types of social engagements are associated with an increase in official channel subscribers. To do so, we collect social media engagement data for the 2896 music videos uploaded between May 2016 and April 2019 by 105 artists who own their YouTube official artist channels. The empirical evidence shows that the official videos incorporating visual, performance and storytelling components can generate more positive engagement from the viewers, while audio-only videos exhibit lower overall engagement intensity. Furthermore, we find that active media engagement, such as leaving ‘comments’, contributes to the increase in channel subscribers beyond the effect of the number of registered videos. Our results suggest that highly involved music fans may show the active types of social engagements, such as leaving a comment on live and follow-up videos. In practice, our findings imply that YouTube creators need to incorporate visual-focused platform characteristics to stimulate in-depth social engagement.