ChinaAlbums.com helps bands or artists set up the official websites or official youtube channels. Why do you need an official one? From the business standpoint, we can easily understand that illegal music downloading would reduce the sale of legitimate copies. But if we are not concerned about record sales, rather only concerned the promotional effect, why do we need official channels? If we let everyone record our shows and post on youtube, doesn’t this have a better promotional effect?

In US, most live performances don’t allow recording or photos. For those that do allow recording, youtube does not allow uploads unless you get permission from the copyright owners. Why is that? If we let everyone upload and share, isn’t that “the more the better”? Actually there is one technical reason this is not good. The following is an example, assuming the band wants to promote the show but does not have an official youtube channel:

• Person A recorded the show and is the first one to upload it into youtube. Quickly he got one thousand views. Person B saw the effect of Person A, and uploaded the same thing. Soon you have copycats of Person C, D,…. Assume we have 10 people uploaded the video and each averages 1K views. This seems like the equivalent of 10K views.  However, one official upload receiving 10K views will create a much stronger impression on potential viewers than the 10 people’s 1K each. But it does not stop there. It is likely out of the 10 opportunists, 7 of them are not law abiding.  If the youtube accounts for those 7 people are banned, that leaves only 3 people with 3K views total. If tomorrow one of the 3 remaining person changed his mind about being a fan and deletes his upload, then you would have only 2 people with 1k views each, a far cry from the 10K views.

• Still uploading video to youtube is the first step of your promotion, so that many websites will start linking your youtube videos to their sites. If relying on person A, B, and C’s youtube accounts to post your videos, and provide the material for links, then when the account or the video is deleted for any reason, youtube would not notify the website which linked the video.  Instead the video would show a black screen. Not only will the website owner have wasted his time and effort, and this will turn off his audience. Thus webmasters are cautious about linking any unofficial release, or the rate of linking decreases if you don’t have an official release.

In summary, ChinaAlbums.com helps bands to establish official channels, manages the release so that we can link, share at websites and share at social networks sites.