Wanted: Musicians

At last month's SXSW in Texas, Youtube announced a partner program for indie bands called Musicians Wanted. This new partnership program allows bands who are accepted to

"make some money from their YouTube videos and each accepted band will have their own dedicated page where they can add gig listings, links to buying their music and their live videos and music."

To make money from the site the bands will get the 'majority' of advertising revenue. And you will also get a share of funds if your music video is embedded on to other sites.

Already one big name band has joined Musicians Wanted. ‘OK Go’ obtained massive fame emanating from the viral success of the video for their song “Here it Goes Again”, and recently left their major label due to disputes over embedding rights of their famed video and have since joined up to Youtube’s new program. In the ’humorous’ video below they explain why they joined Musician’s Wanted.



A few years back, MySpace had a stranglehold on the indie music business, with over 8 million bands and artists on the site as of January ’08. Due to the hijacking of the Social Media market by Facebook [link] MySpace’s popularity has declined substantially and as of March 2010 licensing rights have turned MySpaceMusic into an iTunes-style music store, basically taking away the whole appeal of MySpaceMusic in the first place and leaving unsigned independent bands without a popular area to showcase their talents.

I think this initiative is win-win for Youtube and artists alike, and I don’t think it’ll be too long before we’re hearing about some up-and-coming artist found through Musicians Wanted, in the same way artists like Lily Allen were discovered on Myspace.