Thoughts on a Folk Project YouTube Channel

Post date: Sep 17, 2014 7:34:19 PM

From: Chris Riemer [mailto:jcr@knowledgestreet.com]

Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2014 3:24 PM

To: g_otto@comcast.net; 'Scully, Jean & Siobhan'; 'Cronin, Joanne'; 'Kugel, Alan'; 'Rowedder, Cecillia'; 'Falco, Lori'; 'Schaffer, Mark'

Cc: 'Chris Riemer'

Subject: Thoughts on a Folk Project YouTube Channel

Following up on last night's discussion. The common wisdom is that everyone on the Web wants video, and YouTube is the most popular destination, easily beating out more "professional" sites like Vimeo by the sheer number of visitors.

BASICS

A YouTube channel is essentially a home page within which users can aggregate video content. Pages are defined by a YouTube account. You can subscribe to a channel and be notified when new stuff becomes available.

Here's the Mike Agranoff Channel

You'll note that it's mostly music, with a story or two. Also note that he's organized the content into sub-channels like Mike in Concert, Mike with Gathering Time and Coffeehouse of the Absurd. And if you look very closely, you'll see that one video was uploaded by someone other than Mike. Mike has added some playlists, but is not featuring any other channels. A few comments in the Discussion section, but only a few.

Here's the W. D. Neely Channel

Here you'll note that it's a little less sophisticated, in that Mike has established a personalized URL whereas Bill Neely has not. He's also brought in a video by liking it, even though it has nothing to do with Bill himself, either as a songwriter or a performer. No sub-channels, no featured channels and no discussion.

And if you search YouTube for Horses Sing None of It, you'll find over 5,000 videos created as offshoots of Ralph's TV Program. However, they're not collected as a channel, so you can't subscribe to them, they are just individual video files. Most of them were nominally uploaded by "Ralph," but I have this memory that Dave Kleiner did a lot of the work, perhaps using Ralph's ID. (One of Bill Neely's videos was actually uploaded by me, using his credentials.)

A FOLK PROJECT CHANNEL

Logistically, it's pretty straightforward. It's free, and here's a step-by-step breakdown It goes from Creating the Channel, to Developing Content, to Uploading Videos, Maintaining Your Channel and Promoting Your Channel. Creating the Channel is easy, and we're hip deep in content, so the real sticking point is the Maintenance and Promotion.

The person (or persons) who take on this job should have a good sense for categorization and presentation. They should be able to think of interesting sub-channels (Concerts, Dances, Storytelling, Skits, How-to?), be willing to set up some play lists and moderate a discussion forum. And they should keep an eye on the video-level comments, too, to keep the trolls under control. Ideally, they would be interested in schmoozing, and perhaps featuring the channels of some of our favorite performers. And that may involve getting a performer's permission. I think I've heard that Bill Henderson is allowed such free reign in recording the Minstrel on the understanding that he won't put the videos on line.

I was going to add some proposed performer channels here, but to my surprise I couldn't find even one. There are 107,903 channels returned for a search on "folk music" but most of them are aggregators of one kind or another. In browsing the first seven pages of results, I didn't find a single artist I knew.

A ROLE MODEL

However, I did find The Indie Folk Music Channel.

And it is certainly a destination to emulate. It's doing pretty much everything right, and would be the kind of channel the Folk Project could build. But like everything else we do, it needs a champion. It's been on line for almost two years, has over 6,000 subscribers and has logged almost 850,000 views. In its intro video, it even uses the word "curated" to describe its playlists.

So I would say that something like this could certainly play a role in George's tripod vision of social media, with its content promoted through Twitter and Facebook. I'm only skeptical about that whole champion thing. In my memory, every time the board has collectively decided something was a good idea, and then tried beating the bushes to find a person to carry the banner, we've failed. One exception might be when Mike got some young folks interested in setting up that initial MySpace page, which while dormant is still there. (In the immortal words of Bill Neely, "Nothing ever goes away.")

There's probably a lot more that I don't know, but setting up a channel seems within our capabilities. It's more a matter of managing our expectations. How big and vital do we want it to be, and how small and dormant would be willing to accept?

Cheers,

Chris

PS:

If you think back to the first meeting, we adjourned with a demo of how we could all use the Folk Project's Back Office wiki to make our discussions more valuable. Posting and commenting rather then sending emails. I've posted all of our correspondence in there, but no one else on the committee has taken such a step. Change is hard.