How I started doing music videos on youtube - Bird Youmans - Blog 2
Todays Video is the one that started it all!
I put up some videos on youtube back in youtube's infancy so to speak in 2006. The vids were crude by today's standards because of the limitations of the internet back then and high speed internet was only available to a limited few. Life got in the way and I forgot about those first few videos because I was still traveling and performing until about 2010. My memory was starting to play tricks on me and I decided to retire from the road and just concentrate on some limited studio work since I had opened The Bird's Nest Recording Studio back in 1988 and still had it.
But I also had purchased a little cabin near Franklin NC with my wife in 2001 since I was playing along the parkway a lot. Once I retired from the traveling, I started spending more time there remodeling it. So I was thinking my music days were pretty much behind me. I started another youtube channel where I did a few videos of some of my woodworking projects. Got some better video equipment and better software to edit the vids with and a wonderful thing happened. Google bought youtube and upgraded the platform to Hi Def and suddenly, anyone with a decent camera and editor had the equivalent of a TV station that could be picked up by anyone in the world who watched youtube. High speed internet was becoming more of a thing "the rest of us" could afford. For that reason, youtube became the second most accessed .com next to Google's search engine.
About 7 years went by and the woodworking channel was fun but not doing much because, tho I love working with wood, I'm certainly not a pro and my vids were novelties at best. But one day I happened to get curious (I was missing playing music. If the music is in you, it never leaves.) and was wondering what had happened on my music channel since I never really paid any attention to it much after uploading those first primitive videos. To my surprise, all of them had far more views than any of my wood vids and Sweet By and By had more than all my wood vids added together! I was pleasantly shocked to say the least. And by that time that channel had well over a thousand subs, not that many by todays standards, but enough that it could be "monetized". Suddenly, tho very small, I saw a vision for the channel that could not only bless others with Gods message of love, but buy a few groceries in the process. God will bless you if you let Him!
So I thought, let me see what I can do with this new equipment and software. Those early vids were primitive at best, but with a little time and effort, I envisioned how I could make vids that might be worthy of some views. So, having gotten a morph program, I took my version of What a Friend We Have in Jesus and used a lot of depictions of Jesus and morphed them as the music played and tried to make the scenes coincide with the rhythm of the music to some extent. It instantly took off and gained more views than any of the early vids except Sweet By and By. That one has always gotten more views than any of the others from day one until now. It's the one that let me know what youtube could be.
Since then, the channel has over a hundred vids and gained well more than a quarter million subs and more than 70 million views in total. Beyond anything I could have ever seen coming. I thank all my viewers and subscribers from the bottom of my heart. You have given me a second career in music and I don't have to leave my house since I built a new, smaller studio by the cabin in the mountains and my wife and I have "retired" there. I put retired in quotes because we will never retire. Retirement for us just means we now work at what we love the most. She's into photography and still has her real estate company tho scaled back some and I've always been into music. But I don't have to travel anymore. In my younger days I loved the traveling, but as one gets older, these old bones like to sleep in the bed they're used to lol!
In the next blog, I'll tell you about building the new smaller studio and what it led to.
To explore my youtube channels, click the links below:
A Play List of all my Gospel Songs
Bird's Old Time Gospel Music Sing Along
Click here to go to My Music Store for CD's
The sing along channel is where I do a livestream each Friday night at 9PM EST. I put the words on the screen to my videos and we all sing along and I tell stories about the songs as well as some "Philosophiz'n" here and there. We have what might well be the most loving chat room on the internet. Hope you'll join us if you like the old songs! 💔
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