# Anyone found a way to remove links to other people's videos from your YouTube artist channel?



## rgames (Dec 18, 2020)

I saw something a few days ago about "official" YouTube aritst channels and wasn't sure if mine was actually an official artist channel. It was not, so I decided to request "official" artist channel status (though I'm still not clear what the advantage is).

As soon as it was approved and went live there were links to a bunch of videos that are not mine. And I can't figure out how to stop them from appearing on my new channel. There are the YouTube-generated static-image videos associated with tracks I've released that are made available for YouTube, and those are fine, but there's also a bunch of videos that look like other album releases, many of which have music that isn't even mine.

I tried to contact YouTube support and can't find a clear way to do that, though some people say [email protected] works. I tried that - we'll see. There are also a bunch of threads on the YouTube forums where other musicians are asking how to solve exactly the same problem. Interestingly, all of those threads are locked...???

Has anyone run into this problem and found a way to remove the links to videos that aren't yours?

Alternatively, has anyone found a way to revert back to an "unofficial" channel? At least when I was "unofficial" I could control what appeared on my channel...

Thanks,

rgames


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## Nate Johnson (Dec 27, 2020)

rgames said:


> I saw something a few days ago about "official" YouTube aritst channels and wasn't sure if mine was actually an official artist channel. It was not, so I decided to request "official" artist channel status (though I'm still not clear what the advantage is).
> 
> As soon as it was approved and went live there were links to a bunch of videos that are not mine. And I can't figure out how to stop them from appearing on my new channel. There are the YouTube-generated static-image videos associated with tracks I've released that are made available for YouTube, and those are fine, but there's also a bunch of videos that look like other album releases, many of which have music that isn't even mine.
> 
> ...


Ugh, that would drive me NUTS. 

Unfortunately I’ve got no words of wisdom though.

yay algorithms!


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## VivianaSings (Dec 27, 2020)

ka00 said:


> . Because apparently the algorithm does what it does and no one can stop it. It was a frustrating back and forth with them and I made no progress.


It's kind of frightening how much power these companies are turning over to their algorithms. I'm in NYC but I had a recording session in California like 2 months ago so I flew out there. When I got there I wanted to pull money out of an ATM and the ATM kept rejecting me. It was my bank's ATM so I called my bank. After an hour on the phone the woman kept telling me that she could see my bank card request come in and see the computer instantly reject it. She couldn't understand why the computer was rejecting the transaction but she was powerless to stop the computer. The call actually ended with her telling me, "Is there someone you know in California that you can borrow enough money from to last you until you get back home to NYC?"

Completely frightening.


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## jules (Dec 27, 2020)

VivianaSings said:


> She couldn't understand why the computer was rejecting the transaction but she was powerless to stop the computer.
> 
> Completely frightening.


Ah ! Sarah Connor : 202-055-105


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## rgames (Dec 28, 2020)

ka00 said:


> Because apparently the algorithm does what it does and no one can stop it.


Yeah I got basically the same response.

But it's BS because you can look up, say, Dua Lipa and all the videos that appear on the "artist sidebar" are on her channel. I want the videos that appear in my "artist sidebar" to be the ones on MY channel, not someone else's channel, just like Dua Lipa.

The really frustrating thing is that I didn't have this problem until I converted to an "official" artist channel. And I still can't figure out what the value of the "official" designation is. It's all downside, no upside as far as I can tell.

So anyone else reading this, take note. Go read all the locked YouTube forum posts from other musicians complaining about the same problem.

I will say that it's getting better. At least my own videos are appearing now but there's still some crap from other people's channels.

I recently started promoting my music on Spotify and had the exact same issue there but they cleared it up pretty quickly. I gave them a list of 20 or so tracks that were wrongly associated with me and they were gone within a few days.

rgames


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## Voyage (Feb 25, 2021)

I know this is an old thread however I had the same issue and figured I should drop my solution.
This isn't a complete solution but it will stop the auto-generated songs from being visible on your channel however from what I can tell they are still searchable.

If you go to YouTube Studio > Customization > Layout, you can delete the sections that show auto-generated videos. For my situation this was enough because I upload my own videos for my music so I don't care about the auto-generated ones but if you still want yours to be visible you can probably add them to a playlist and add it as a section in Customization > Layout.

As for getting other peoples music permanently removed I am waiting until I have a big enough channel to contact artist support and hopefully figure out the issue.

As for how this happens in the first place, from what I can figure out when you convert your channel into an official artist channel YouTube grabs the auto-generated topic channel/s for your music and merges it with whatever channel you are converting to official artist. Now the issue with this is that topic channels are quite often a mix of a bunch of music with similarly named artists. To avoid this in the first place I have since found support threads with people saying you need to request to have your music moved to a separate topic channel before merging.

Hope this helps


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