A few days ago the music channel Majestic Casual on YouTube published a short note to its viewers explaining its radio silence.

Citing personal issues and a sense of non-purposefulness, the YouTuber asked viewers to answer a few questions, ‘what inspires you about majestic?’, ‘what connects you to this journey?’ and ‘what keeps bringing you back?’. In honor of the music channel that sucked me into the complex, layered world of electronic music, I think I could answer those questions in a few words.

YouTube is a fantastic place to find new music, and I think one of the primary reasons why is because the music itself is never separate from its identifying visuals, be it album covers, curated photos, art or even animations. Some of the most spectacular albums of the past few years have had equally memorable visuals, Jamie XX’s geometric dances to Flume’s deeply saturated bio-inspired visualizers.

Rory Seydel, creative director of LANDR, a music promotion platform, quotes ‘seeing will always be part of hearing’ in an argument that album art will always be critical for success. And just like how a great album cover would convince you to buy a record, images on YouTube work quite the same way; these little worlds flash in your recommended, drawing you in to new music like a moth to a flame.

In other streaming platforms, this connection is quite dilute, often lost in the overwhelming flood of recommended tracks. Majestic, along with its contemporaries such as TheSoundYouNeed and even better, Colors, weaponize visual material to catapult music to new audiences. Majestic uses a curated selection of photography and art from various platforms such as flickr and instagram, Colors uses extremely specific hues to create the atmosphere of their artists.

Though it has taken awhile for Majestic to find its stride in pairing the perfect image with a track, the channel’s most well-known promoted tracks are inextricably linked to their visual accompaniment.  These range from a literal (but no less compelling) translation , such as Mura Masa’s Miss You or a translation of rhythm such as Mura Masa’s Move Me or even purely just a translation of feeling such as Tom Misch’s The Journey. Mura Masa and Tom Misch are some of the many artists that gained immense popularity through this incredibly intuitive combination of still image and music, the former a peek into a whole universe of experience the tracks explore.

Majestic created a brand for itself with white lower-case text centered upon the video frame. The ‘Est. 2011’ date stamping the branded logo on both track and image creates ownership over content despite its crowd-sourced origins. Other channels have have emulated this combination but often not as well, missing the consistency in quality of aural-visual pairing (including a specifically designed name, logo and font).

Even if the music is good, its the quality of the package that really pulls viewers in, elevating the channel’s content from flippant, passive listening to engaged and productive music exploration. There are so many channels now doing exactly what Majestic intended to do, branded white text on colorful images ubiquitous in my recommended. Yet only a few really do stand out.

So yes, what inspires me, connects me and keeps bringing me back to Majestic is that I’ve found much more than just music on this channel… and eventually the channel has persuaded me to much prefer YouTube over any other streaming platform.

In a landscape of information overload, I’ve formed attachments to these tracks  that I would have never have found if not for Majestic’s unique delivery of content… a technique that is much more than just the characteristic of another YouTube promotion channel.

I’ve linked some of my current favorite tracks from the channel below.