What Do People Want?

How Should a Bass Player Plan for a YouTube & Social Media Journey

I've been doing some form of social media for the last 6.5 years. Not always consistently, but I've published a fair amount of bass and related videos over that time. It's been interesting and fun. And frustrating. With the launch of the MakingBass.com site, I've been trying to find that balance between the time and effort it takes to create a video/blog post/YouTube Short/Instagram post/etc. and spending time actually practicing, writing, and working on other, non-music projects.

Goals

I'd like to build an audience of bass players and music fans through interesting/entertaining content. I'd also like to build a community of bass players to interact with. I always like to hear other ideas and viewpoints when it comes to bass, bass playing, and gear. And, finally, introduce my music through projects like MakingBass Instrumentals, Radius80, and 1-900/16-BITOCRACY.

I never looked at making YouTube a part of any type of income stream. Probably not a good idea for anybody to do that given the peculiarities of the YouTube algorithm and people's ever-changing tastes. Not that I don't want to reach the point of monetization. I actually do. I think that's a good goal to have and something to work towards. But it's not a requirement to keep doing this.

Best Type of Bass Content

As you can see by the image above, I broke down content types into 4 categories.

• Bass Shredding: Do more soloing content and shred as much as possible. This is more the Instagram/Tik-Tok approach, I guess.

• Podcasting: Do one or more podcasts covering bass and music related content, including bands, other bass players, the music biz, gear reviews, etc.

• Playing Songs: Playing full covers and original tunes, with related content about the songs, tabs, discussions, etc.

• Other: What else?

What do you think? What do you want to see/hear on a channel focused on bass?

• DD