YouTube consolidates music mess with Official Artist Channels

YouTube last year rolled out Official Artist Channels to help make it easier for folks to keep tabs on their fave artists by collating official videos, live clips, songs and albums all into a single channel.

Now, the giant streaming platform is consolidating all those subscribers under a single “official” account for each artist.

In the weeks ahead, the Official Artist Channel will become a “single destination that gives you access to an artist’s full body of work,” boasts YouTube in a statement issued Tuesday, and, in future, notifications will be sent only the Official Artist Channel whenever new videos are uploaded or when an artist wants to reach out. Finding the Official Artist Channel for an artist will be as simple as searching for their name on YouTube.

The move simplifies matters for fans hunting content and gives artists more reach to promote their releases. It also gives the muso and their reps more control and opportunities to connect with fans through YouTube features such as Community Posts, Mobile Live and Ticketing. One hitch for high-profile artists: this push will diminish the visibility of an artist’s Vevo channel.

According to Variety, Vevo music channels will continue to appear when they are specially searched for directly or through YouTube’s filter. And if an artist only has a Vevo channel, it’ll still be searchable.

YouTube’s development answers some questions about why YouTube recently adopted the global International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI), a global initiative which assigns an ID so that every published work can be attributed to its creator.

Those fans currently subscribed to an “unofficial” artist channel will soon be automatically hooked up with their verified property and their subscription to “unofficial” artist channels will become inactive. So if you’re an artist pumping out your music from any old YouTube channel, get yourself authorized, pronto.
The Official Artist Channels project lands ahead of YouTube’s plans to release a third paid music service, tentatively planned for March.

According to a report published last year in Bloomberg, the yet-to-launch service has a working title of Remix and will offer on-demand streaming music and videos.

Read more on Official Artist Channels here.

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.