Home FAQs YouTube Topic Channel: What Is It and How Does It Work for Artists?

YouTube Topic Channel: What Is It and How Does It Work for Artists?

Last updated on Sep 08, 2025

Topic Channel

When your music is distributed on YouTube, the platform automatically generates a channel with your artist name. This channel is not managed by you, since it is created directly by YouTube, and therefore you don’t have access to control it. These are called Topic Channels, and they are the first place where your music appears on YouTube.

To take control of your presence on the platform, you need to convert that Topic Channel into your Official Artist Channel (OAC). This process consists of linking the automatically generated Topic Channel with the personal channel you created yourself. By doing this, all your music, followers, and views will be merged into one single official space under your artist channel.

What you need to know

  • All the music that appears on your Topic Channel can be transferred/merged into your own official YouTube page.

  • You won’t lose any views from the videos that are transferred.

  • You won’t lose any subscribers from the Topic Channel: they will be added to the subscribers of your official page!

Step-by-step guide

Important: You must first upgrade to our PRO service in order to request your Official Artist Channel.

  1. Identify the Topic Channel associated with your music that you want to merge.

  2. Make sure that ALL the music in these Topic Channels truly belongs to you.

    • If a Topic Channel with your music contains songs from other artists, you must write to artist-support@youtube.com and request that they remove the tracks that don’t belong to you before continuing.

  3. Request your Official Artist Channel once you have identified the Topic Channel and confirmed that it only contains your music. How to Get an Official Artist Channel on YouTube?

Why doesn’t my Topic Channel include my artist name?

In many cases, YouTube places an artist’s music in channels titled “Various Artists – Topic” or “Release – Topic.”
This usually happens because the creation of Topic Channels is an automated process used by the platform to index content from lesser-known artists or those with fewer plays.