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YouTube's unified artist channels clean up its music mess

No more sifting through multiple channels to track down tunes.

FilmMagic for YouTube

If you treat YouTube like a jukebox, you know how confusing it can be when your favorite artists have multiple channels. You may have to go to one channel to get the pure album cuts, and another to watch the music videos. Mercifully, YouTube is reducing that clutter -- it's launching unified Official Artist Channels that put all of a musician's content in one place. In theory, you just have to search for an artist by their name to find everything they've posted to the site.

If you've subscribed to an artist's unofficial channel, YouTube will automatically switch you over to an official source when available and will unsubscribe you to the old one.

It's not clear whether or not this will eliminate one of the bigger annoyances for music fans on YouTube: having to switch to a Vevo-branded channel to watch music videos. We've asked the company if this changes the situation and will let you know if it does. This could create problems for fans who want to limit exactly what they see, but YouTube is betting that the overall simplicity will help both viewers and artists. You might spend less time wading through search results, while musicians could reach a wider audience.