To start this off, I write original music and do covers. I've been doing this for a good while now, but I've never really cared about my views or retention for the most part because I figured the longer I do this the more views and retention would go up as I found my audience. But, I noticed that it wasn't happening for the most part. I've had a handful of videos hit triple digits, and two of my videos, one an original song and the other a cover song, reached a little over 1k views.

But the thing is, the retention is the same across all my videos, from ones that get 50 views, all the way to the ones with 1k. The views plummet from the moment the video starts and evens out around the 1 minute mark, but then only like 5% or less of viewers actually finish the videos. I already know that my mixing and mastering is lackluster, and I've been considering hiring a mixing engineer to take care of that for me, and my videos are fairly boring.

I am playing with just one angle with nothing else happening, and I already know that after doing this for so long and having less than 100 subs that I won't be making this a career and that I won't be making money off of my music, but I'm curious to see what others retention looks like and how you think you keep it because all the threads that I've read are relating to other types of videos.

Edit: To add, the reason I ask is because I'll see other popular channels that do the same thing, but I assumed they were doing well because their channels were already established, and their mixing was actually good. That could be a huge part of it, but still. I figured if that was the case then I would be hitting 1k views more often than twice.