The first thing I did was go to suno.com/ghall184 and start generating music. Suno works by taking a text prompt describing the genre, mood, instrumentation, and vocal style you want — and generating a full original track in about 30 seconds. I had experimented with different prompts before launch and already had a clear sound in mind: luxury Neo-Soul and R&B with female vocals, warm Rhodes piano, and late-night cinematic energy.

For my first compilation video I generated 10 original tracks using detailed style prompts covering different moods within the Neo-Soul genre — a slow-burning ballad, a breezy West Coast soul groove, a midnight jazz-soul fusion, a gospel-tinged piece, and a lo-fi soul track with tape warmth. Each generation takes about 30 seconds. Refining and selecting the best takes took about 2 hours total.

Once I was happy with the tracks I published them from my Suno profile — this makes them publicly accessible and attributable to my account.

I set up the YouTube channel at @GoldHourMusic from scratch. The name Gold Hour Music was chosen deliberately — “golden hour” has massive search volume across music, lifestyle, and aesthetic content, and it signals the premium warm soulful vibe I wanted the channel to represent.

Channel setup checklist I worked through: custom handle (@GoldHourMusic), channel description optimised with my focus keywords (luxury R&B, Neo-Soul, late night vibes, AI music), channel banner created in Canva at 2560×1440px, profile picture at 800×800px (gold vinyl record aesthetic generated in Midjourney), channel keywords added in YouTube Studio Settings, country set to USA, language set to English, and links added to my Suno profile and opulencesource.com.

This is the part that intimidated me most going in — and turned out to be the most straightforward. For a faceless music compilation channel the video itself is simply a beautiful looping background visual with a music visualizer at the bottom and the music playing underneath. No talking. No editing cuts. No graphics overlays.

Background visual: I generated a luxury penthouse living room image in Midjourney — deep blue city night outside floor-to-ceiling windows, a glowing fireplace, dozens of candles, warm amber and purple light. The full prompt is available in my image prompt guide. I imported this static image into CapCut and applied a very subtle Ken Burns slow pan effect — this adds just enough movement to keep the visual from feeling completely frozen without any zoom or dramatic camera motion.

Music visualizer: In CapCut I added a minimal audio spectrum visualizer at the bottom of the frame — ultra-thin bars in teal and mint green (#00E5CC fading to #4FFFB0) at 60% opacity and 8% maximum screen height. The effect is elegant and barely-there — like a heartbeat line at the bottom of the screen.

Assembly: I imported all 10 Suno tracks in order, set the total video duration to match the full playlist length, added auto-captions in white plain text at the bottom left (matching the aesthetic from my reference video), and exported at 1080p.

The description is where most new YouTubers completely underinvest — and where most of the discoverability is won or lost. YouTube’s algorithm reads your description to understand what your video is about and who to recommend it to. A weak description means the algorithm has nothing to work with.

My first video title: “Gold Hour Vibes — Luxury Neo-Soul Playlist for Elevated Moments 🎵✨”

The description structure I used: hook sentence with focus keyword in the first two lines (before “Show More”), one paragraph describing the mood and occasion, a full timestamped tracklist (YouTube indexes every chapter title as a separate keyword), a “Perfect for:” section listing 8 use cases (late night unwinding, slow romantic evenings, working from home, etc.), an About Gold Hour Music section with keyword-rich language, links to my Suno profile and opulencesource.com, a music information section, and then 30 hashtags across three tiers — high volume, niche, and long-tail.

I uploaded the video in YouTube Studio, set the visibility to Public, added all tags, selected the relevant category (Music), enabled automatic chapters from the tracklist timestamps, set a custom thumbnail (the background image from the video with no text overlay — clean and aesthetic), and published.

Immediately after publishing I posted the first pinned comment — a mood poll asking viewers what elevated moment they are listening in. This drives early engagement which signals to YouTube’s algorithm that the video is creating interaction and is worth recommending further.

I also created the first playlist — “Gold Hour Essentials” — and added the video immediately. Playlists give YouTube additional context about your channel’s content structure and create a second discovery path for new viewers.

YouTube rewards consistency above almost everything else. Publishing once and waiting is not a growth strategy — publishing consistently on a schedule is. My week one content plan was two videos in the first week to signal to the algorithm that this is an active channel worth recommending.

For the second video I used a different visual aesthetic — a rainy day window with a cosy reading corner for a different mood — and a different music selection from Suno focused on melancholic and introspective Neo-Soul. Different visual, different mood, same brand quality level.

I also shared the channel on the Opulence Source blog — adding the Gold Hour Music YouTube link to relevant posts and mentioning it in the digital income content. Cross-promoting between opulencesource.com and @GoldHourMusic creates a two-way traffic pipeline between the blog audience and the YouTube audience.