YouTube

YouTube is the best-known and most popular video sharing site on the web. It uses flash to encode your videos in a compact format, and gives you many tools to encourage video sharing, such as the ability to embed a YouTube video in a website, or even in discussion boards or social networking sites like MySpace.

Some of the features that you should be aware of as a musician are that people can subscribe to your videos as a feed, and get notified when new ones are added. Some people will use these to keep and eye on your new videos. The quality of MySpace is unfortunately not as high as other video sharing sites like blip.tv, so note that there are other options. There are a few other downsides: First of all, after your video, it will try to show your fan related videos, some of which might be ones that you haven't uploaded. You may end up sending your hard-won website visitor elsewhere.

If you use YouTube to host your video content for your band, you should be aware of a few other things as well:

a. Cover songs may get you in trouble with their user agreement. Most bands post anyway with no trouble, but unlike playing on stage or on the radio, the rights for video broadcast on the web for cover songs are complex, and hard to clear.

b.Encoding for the best quality on YouTube is not simple. In fact, there are many formats that you can start from to do the encoding, and each of them can have a big variation in quality once you encode. YouTube is generally a low-quality result. Sites like blip.tv are better quality, but your fans may have a hardter time knowing how to share those (even though it's straightforward to do, they are probably more familiar with YouTube.) You should make sure that the sound quality on the original source video is as high as possible before you encode, because sound usually is the key part of music videos.

c. If you have a lot of videos, it becomes more difficult to post on your web presences, because your site can become littered with those YouTube boxes everywhere. Sites like Mogulus are a better choice if you have a lot of videos to share because you can have one video box, and show them all in a row, keeping people on your site. (Although they show ads, so there's no free lunch.)