On Tuesday, January 23, 2018, YouTube made a huge announcement to compile artists’ channels under their Official Artist Channel. Furthermore, YouTube is now a registration agency for the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) system.
YouTube begins rolling out Official Artist Channels
This new change to the platform will allow greatly improve and streamline the service for artists by “combining any separate channels dedicated to music videos, live performances, full albums or individual songs under a single destination,” states Billboard. “The changes will equally impact all music partners, most notably VEVO channels, making Official Artist Channels denoted with a musical note the first thing users will find in a search.”
Over the next few weeks, YouTube will be rolling out and compiling the Official Artist Channels.
What being a registration agency for ISNI means
Through ISNI, musicians and songwriters will more accurately be identified for royalty payments on YouTube. This is a revolutionary system, especially on such a massive platform that is so widely used by musicians and creatives around the world.
By adopting ISNI, artists, songwriters and other creators will be unambiguously identified, enabling better visibility and tracking on YouTube. Bringing the ISNI open standard to music opens the door to more accurate credit for creators, discovery for fans, and transparency for the industry.
– FX Nuttall, YouTube’s Technical Program Manager
This means that YouTube will not request or provide ISNI codes for creators that use the platform for sharing content. “YouTube will allocate numbers and share them with any of the artist’s record label or other business partners to encourage wider use of the ISNI system,” states Billboard.
By encouraging other artists, labels, and business partners to use the ISNI system, musicians and songwriters will be able to more accurately get paid for the songs they’re sharing on the platform.
We view this as a transformative opportunity to offer the music industry a valuable identifier scheme and in so doing, to deepen ISNI’s knowledge of this domain and improve its technical facilities and approaches.
– Tim Devenport, ISNI International Agency Executive Director
In previous news, YouTube has recently renewed its contract with the major labels. The Google-owned video giant also updated its terms for channel monetization for users after coming under fire from its users for Logan Paul’s mishap.
