New official artist channels on YouTube

Jan 23, 2018 - Product News

If you’re a music fan, one of the best things about YouTube is that you can find much more than just the official version of a song. Across the platform, you can find music videos, lyric videos, covers, unplugged sets, live performances, backstage footage of your favorite artist and more.

We launched Official Artist Channels last year to help make it easier for fans to find content from their favorite artists by uniting their full body of work (from official videos to live performances, to individual songs and albums) under one channel.

Today, we’re simplifying things even more by bringing together an artist’s subscribers under their Official Artist Channel. Uniting subscribers under one channel means you’ll be able to go deeper and explore all of the content from the artists you love. For fans looking for music from the artists they love, finding the Official Artist Channel for an artist will soon be as simple as searching for their name on YouTube. You can also identify the Official Artist Channel by looking for the artist icon in YouTube search and on the channel page.

If you're currently subscribed to an unofficiall artist channel, you will soon be subscribed to their Official Artist Channel and your subscription to any unofficial artist channels will become inactive. The Official Artist Channel is a single destination that gives you access to an artist’s full body of work, so you’ll now receive notifications solely from the Official Artist Channel whenever new videos are uploaded or when an artist wants to send a message to their fans.

For artists, uniting your subscribers under one channel means you have more reach to promote your latest releases. It also gives you (and your team if you’ve got one) control over your presence and the opportunity to engage directly with your fans through YouTube features like Community Posts, Mobile Live and Ticketing.

We will be expanding the roll-out of the new Official Artist Channels to artists on the platform over the coming weeks. Artists looking for more information on their Official Artist Channels can read more on the Help Center. Fans looking for more information on how to manage their channel subscriptions, notifications and search for channels can visit this Help Center article and view the informational video.