What is a YouTube topic channel and how does it work?

YouTube Music will feature everything you expect from a streaming music service, including millions of songs, albums, thousands of playlists, and artist-based radio. Its major differentiator from YouTube is YouTube's catalog of remixes, live performances, covers, and music videos that aren't on other platforms.

You can publish your music on this platform (in both the Basic and PRO plan), just make sure you select YouTube Music when planning your release.

If you haven't upgraded your artist YouTube channel to an official artist channel then YouTube will post your music on what is called a Topic Channel.

Topic Channels

When your release has been distributed, you might see an "automatic" channel created on YouTube under your name, but not connected to your own official YouTube channel.  At YouTube, these automatic channels are called "topic channels".

Various Artists - Topic

Many times, YouTube adds artists' music to a channel called "Various Artists - Topic". This is usually for undiscovered artists with smaller play counts. When an artist becomes more popular, their music is often moved (by YouTube) to a hashtag channel.

Here's what you need to know

• All music appearing on the topic channel can be moved/merged to your own/official YouTube page.

• You won't lose any plays on the videos being moved over.

• You won't lose any followers from the topic channel: they will be added to the followers of your own official page!

Step by Step Guide

• Step 1 -  Identify the topic channel(s) that you want to merge into your account. There may be more than one.

• Step 2 - Make sure ALL the music on these topic channels are actually your own tracks. If a topic channel with your music contains music by other artists, then you need to write artist-support@youtube.com and ask them to remove the music that isn't yours, before you proceed.

• Step 3 - Once you've identified the topic channels and confirmed they only have your music on them, you can request the Indiefy support team to request an official artist channel for you.