When you start a YouTube channel as a musician, you have a few options that you can change in your YouTube studio.
You probably have seen the options to change your language, tags, currency, etc.
But there is one setting that might be the most important one of all. The Content Made for Kids setting. (COPPA)
This will affect your YouTube channel in a big way, and can easily be overlooked.
If you want to watch the video, check it out here:
Blog continues below the video.
YouTube Content Made for Kids (Coppa)
You can change this setting in just a few steps, but let me also share some details about it.
The “made for kids” setting is used by YouTube to determine the type of content that you upload.
It helps YouTube to know where they should put your content and who the ideal audience for your video is.
With this setting, YouTube marks it as “kid-safe” and will put it on the YouTube kids page.
And, although it still will be reviewed by their software to determine if it is safe for kids, it will not alert you if you mark your latest cover song as Safe for Kids.
The main problem? A YouTube for Kids video will not show on the main YouTube site!
Even though people can watch it if you send over your YouTube video link, they are not able to find it by search or suggested videos.
And that is usually how you want to be found as a musician and/or artist!
You can check your own videos by opening a private window in your browser, and typing in the url of the video.
If the setting is Made for Kids, you will see this at the bottom of your videos. Even the comments are turned off!
What is Made for Kids content?
Because YouTube wants to filter violence, profanity and adult content, it also uses this setting on a YouTube channel as a guidance. They still filter your video/song after every upload, but this setting will determine how it should treat your channel in full.
This is also where the confusion might happen.(No worries, it happens to many musicians 🙂
If you are a musician, or you upload music related content, you might think of it as Kid-safe.
Especially if you create music that could be enjoyed by kids!
But, it might be Kid safe, it is not Made for kids!
A good example of a real Made for Kids content is nursery rhymes.
Also, kids cartoons, sketches that are made for kids and kids games can be included in this category.
YouTube lists this in the following way.
Content made for kids:
” Children are the primary audience of the video”
“Children are not the primary audience, but the video is still directed at children because it features actors, characters, activities, games, songs, stories, or other subject matter that reflect an intent to target children.”
(-You can read the full article here-)
Now, in short, unless you compose nursery rhymes or cartoons for kids, as a musician, you probably want to set this to No, set this channel as not made for kids 🙂
If you own a YouTube channel as a school, and sometimes have mixed content (for kids vs for young adults) you can also check “I want to review this setting for every video”.
That way, you have to manually set this in every new upload.
OK, lecture over 🙂
How do you change the YouTube “Content made for Kids” setting?
You can find and change this setting from within your YouTube Studio.
Click on the gear icon in the bottom left corner, called “settings”:
Click on Channel and choose Advanced settings.
Here, you see the Made for Kids setting.
Like I mentioned before, you usually want this setting to be set as No, set this channel as not made for kids.
Click on save and you are done!
It can take a while before you will see the results, but usually you should see an increase in overall views after a while.
I really hope that this tip helped you, the awesome musician, to share your music with the world.
Maurice from Music-Mindset.com
You can read more details about the COPPA rules here:
