[lucaspiller]

As someone who isn't at all familiar with music distribution, is YouTube really the best way for indie artists to distribute, and monetise, their music? The audio quality seems a lot lower compared to Spotify, and I don't really want to waste bandwidth on a video just to listen to music while I'm working. On the other hand I've noticed some mainstream music is blocked for me on Spotify, but available on YouTube.

[clarry]

I don't know about monetization, but for distribution, youtube has a huge audience. A lot of people just listen to music on youtube because it's free and accessible. So I think it's fair to say you can have great reach on youtube. At the same time, I don't know about discoverability; if you're a small artist (nobody heard of you), your video is going to have very few views, and it's unlikely to be recommended for random people listening to popular music. I don't know if other services fare any better in this regard though.

Bandwidth isn't a consideration for most people as long as it just works, and quality is good enough.

[ifdefdebug]

bandwidth is not a problem as long as your vid is just a still image

[zo1]

Additionally, if you use youtube-dl[1], you can oftentimes simply download the audio component of the video without ever touching the video.

The only problem with music on youtube is the variability of the quality and the ability to find good-quality versions of the songs you want.

[1] https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl

[clarry]

Well keyframes are a thing and it's likely that the still image is going to be encoded a few hundred times on an average length song. Especially in a HD video (which is what you want as the audio bitrate grows along with it) the video part could be massive compared to the actual music.

[tormeh]

Soundcloud.