in this DistroKid tutorial i'm going to show you something really cool how you can easily get your
official artist channel on youtube and i'll also show you why you might want one i'm zane welcome
to audio tech tv where it's my goal to help you conquer the tech so you can unleash your creative
beast now this video is not sponsored by DistroKid it's something that i wanted to do personally
and i thought i'd share the process with you so you could do it if you wanted to and if you don't
have a DistroKid account yet and you want to save seven percent off their already low price of just
twenty dollars a year then use the link down in the description and you'll save that seven percent
but right now let's begin so the first thing that you're going to want to do is have some
music released through DistroKid and it says that you need to have at least three official releases
and this can be three singles if you wanted so if you aren't there yet get creating some music
but having said that i was able to do this having only one single released for the artist that i did
this on also to note you may have to wait a week or so for your music to actually be posted on
youtube from DistroKid but i've noticed that this typically takes like a day or two after releasing
it through distrokid so it's always been fairly quick for me now this next step is to create a
youtube channel for your band or yourself whoever you release your music as but you want to create
a separate youtube channel just for that musical project so if you already have one that's great
if you need to create one but you already have a personal youtube channel then you can easily
create a brand account from that one all you have to do is go to youtube.com/account and you
can see in this section where it says your channel you can go to add or remove your channels and from
this one you can see i have three channels in here the main one is this mountain rain music
and then these other ones are brand accounts from that one so if i wanted i could create a
new channel by clicking there and then once it's created you can go to the customize your channel
make a header image and maybe give it a profile picture like this go to your about section and
you can put a little description in there if you want maybe like a bio or just something about your
musical project that makes it unique so now you want to go back to your DdistroKid dashboard and
you want to go up to goodies that's right this is a goodie and you want to go down to this special
access section that DistroKid gives you and from here you can see youtube official artist channel
so click on that and now let's just look at what it says here it says official artist channels are
designed to help artists and their teams get the most out of youtube upgrade your channel today to
gain access to analytics and tools that will help you engage with millions of fans and better manage
your presence on the platform so does that sound good to you because it definitely sounds good
to me to have the analytics and all of that stuff plus you get that cool little musical note beside
your name to show that you're an official artist channel now let's look at some of the requirements
so it says you need a youtube channel that you manage so that's that one that we just created
or you already have that's dedicated to your music project if it's a band or your personal name
that you use for your music but you want it to be specific to the music not just your personal vlog
channel or something like that and it says here it doesn't have to be the same email that you used
for DistroKid so don't worry about that it just needs to be a youtube account that you control
and you can see here it says a youtube channel that primarily features music from this artist
don't pick the channel for your label or a channel dedicated to a genre of music something like that
you want it specific to this artist so then down here i'm not sure i have the music plus planned so
i can have more than one artist so you might not have this drop down box here i'm not sure of that
but you would click here if you do and you would select the artist that you want to use
so i already made one for the electric shark if i click there it says that i've already connected
it to the youtube channel right on but i haven't done one for the silver rocket surfers project
so i'm going to click on that and i'm going to say yes i have a youtube channel that's dedicated to
silver rocket surfers the other options here are no i don't have a youtube channel and you
can see i can't do anything if i don't have one if i click on yes i have a youtube channel that
contains content from silver rocket surfers and other artists it says sorry channels with multiple
artists are ineligible to be official artist channels so you want it to be one that's specific
to that artist i've said it numerous times but i just wanted to get that through
that it has to be specific to that artist once you click there you say link your youtube channel beta
it's going to bring up this window here now from here you would click on whatever account it is
that you use for your youtube channel and don't worry if you have multiple accounts under that one
you just click on the main account and then you can see you have your other options here so i'm
going to click on silver rocket surfers it says distrokid wants to access your google account
and this is going to allow DistroKid to view your youtube account so what does that mean it
views our videos and playlists and they also view our youtube activity so if you're cool with that
which i am it's really just so it can allow youtube to add your topic channel videos into
your official artist account things like that so it's not really something that i'm concerned
with but you can click on the privacy policy and all that stuff if you want and you can see
learn about the risks if you want to do that i'm going to allow it so i've selected that channel
and it says are you sure you want to claim this youtube channel once you claim an official artist
channel the process for changing your channel selection can take days to weeks
artists are encouraged to select a suitable channel or create a new one that is suitable
so i'm going to say yes claim this channel and it's done and says your request to claim this
channel has been submitted to youtube youtube will email you when the request is processed and then
you can do another one if you want or just say i'm all done so now obviously i just created that
one so it's not going to show you all the things that you get with an official artist account but
i did do it on this account here the electric shark which only has one single released so
it does work with one single so you can see i have that little music note here and if you hover over
it it says official artist channel so what did we get with the official artist channel well you can
see here i have biography now so if you don't have it you would have the description and you also get
this biography which shows up in other places like youtube music and that sort of thing so
it does show up in more than just this spot right here you also get this community tab here
typically i think you need a thousand subscribers to access this community tab so it's cool that
i only have 27 subscribers i actually had this when i only had one subscriber which was myself
and it gave me this community tab so i can type in things in here and reach out to my 27 subscribers
if i really wanted to i could make polls put images in there add video mention other channels
if i wanted to and that's a pretty cool feature right there to keep in contact with your community
now let's go to the home you can see here that it's added music videos that are from the topic
channel that automatically gets created by youtube so this is the electric shark topic
and those always get created for you automatically on youtube and they are monetized so if you watch
this video there's a commercial that starts with it before i actually get to the music
so it's cool that this is on your official page and people can click on that right from there they
don't have to go to this topic channel which is a separate channel you can see this one only has
four subscribers on it you'll also notice that on this topic channel it has the same profile picture
that i set for the other channel and that's because you can set the profile picture when you
have an official artist channel if you don't have an official artist channel it's usually going to
take the image of your latest release and i'll show you on the silver rocket surfers channel
oh yeah it's actually the silver rocket surfers topic channel so we'll go there
so here's the silver rocket surfers topic channel and you can see that the
logo here the profile picture whatever is just the image from the latest release so
that is a cool feature to get when you have an official artist channel on youtube you can
change that logo and you can change it as often as you need now let's go into our youtube studio as
there's some things in here that are different from a regular youtube studio you can see here
we have a concerts tab which you don't have in a normal youtube studio and in there there could be
concerts that you might have coming up and that sort of thing you also have this profile tab
in here it says tell your fans a little bit about yourself use a high quality photo and you can see
i put that photo in there but if you hover over this it says it has to be rectangle it says the
size but it also says show your face no text or album art and i didn't notice that until after
but i did include that there and then here's the biography that you can change up however you want
and it shows you where this stuff is going to appear so on the youtube music app
in playlists charts and in search and from here you can also add gallery photos so these photos
can show up in a gallery like on your home page and that sort of thing now let's just go to our
analytics because again this is different from regular youtube analytics because you can now view
other channels meaning that official topic channel that youtube created for you so you can monitor
that topic channel as this channel that i created has no content of its own it only has that one
video from the topic channel and as you can see here i have access to how many views it has 78 63
unique viewers and the watch time hours for that plus if we go into reach i can see the reach for
that video that's not on this channel specifically but it is part of your official artist channel
we can go to engagement and audience and we have access to all of this information which
is a really nice thing when you're just starting out on youtube and you're trying to build that
fan base so you have access to some analytics to give you an idea of what you need to do where you
should post what you should post and that sort of thing what songs are working for you which songs
are not working for you and another cool thing about having an official artist channel is you're
now eligible for the artist on the rise and this is where youtube showcases music videos from
emerging artists so you can be a part of that and you can maybe get chosen to be that so yeah you
do get that cool little musical note that shows you're an official artist channel but you also get
a lot of nice things to help you be an artist on youtube if you want to check out more music
marketing and releasing videos click up here or click down here to see what youtube recommends
if you like this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos
like this thank you so much for watching for audio tech tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon