Smarter Ways to Share YouTube Content

I have been on various forums for a good while now, but this is also applicable to sharing content on Web sites, blogs, Facebook, and other such mediums. Here are a few suggestions on ways in which users can share content to where it will actually be there x number of years from now, instead of being lost to history because it got deleted for reasons we all probably know about. That's the idea, anyway.

Find official content: What tends to happen with YouTube videos is that they get moved, deleted, set to private, and so on, even if they are on official outlets. This has the effect of disabling any YouTube video links a poster adds when he/she is writing about a topic(s). Mostly, though, these videos are getting deleted due to copyright. The majority of content I listen to isn't on a Vevo channel, so when I come across a new song in an unofficial mix on an unofficial channel, I know that at some point that mix is likely to get deleted, or the entire channel ends up getting deleted due to copyright. Knowing this, I then take it upon myself to try as hard as possible to find an official upload, whether that be on the original artist's channel, the label's channel, or some sort of other recognized/official uploader and/or promoter. I do this even if a different uploader adds better value to the song via a cool background, fancy video, or the fact that they've uploaded the full version instead of a stupid radio edit. I know, I know: "Cool background? It's about the music anyway, bro." And it certainly is, which is why I think it's important to take the necessary steps to find the proper content.

Searching: Given the above, I try to search on the artist's YouTube channel for the song directly in question. If I can't find it there -- or find the artist's channel at all -- I then try to find the label's channel. If that's not possible, perhaps the song is big or mainstream enough to be on a Vevo channel. When all YouTube searches yield no results, I try to search on Soundcloud, even though that's not as ubiquitous as a YouTube video. Other people might recommend Spotify, or a myriad of other services, but I have no experience with them from a technical standpoint.

Example: Is the song available on any of the following?:

Artist's YouTube: No
Label's YouTube: No
Vevo: No
Soundcloud: Yes

Because the only official upload is available on Soundcloud, I would choose that link over any other unofficial link. Some sites have Soundcloud embedding, some don't. I used to want to choose the video with the better background, but I've since stopped doing this because I want that guy or girl five years from now to be able to play a video I posted and relate it to the write-up I did about it, rather than lose that to history because I chose the wrong video that ended up just getting deleted. Let's face it, I'm not going through all this trouble to present undiscovered material on Internet forums just to have that negated due to these issues. With that beef noted, I don't mind going out of my way to find the official content, especially if I believe in the music being created, or that it spoke to me in some way.

YouTube Auto-Generated Channels: From what I can reasonably assume (this is nothing more than an educated guess), YouTube is trying to help provide official content by adding channel names via randomly-generated searches, otherwise known as YouTube-Topic channels. YouTube has a page discussing it, but it's not in depth at all -- very surfacecy and nontransparent. As it were, they look like this:

Artist A-Topic

or

Artist B-Topic

The -Topic channels are more of a compilation of different things, even non-music-related, and this is all based off of your searching history or the history of multiple searches of a similar topic. Basically, YouTube is auto-creating these channels without a human at the helm.

YouTube is also using the pound key in front of the artists' names for content that is licensed to them from an artist or label. It looks like this:

#Artist A

or

#Artist B

Using Nirvana as an example, there would be two different auto-generated channels that look like this:

Nirvana-Topic

or

#Nirvana

I'm not entirely clear on how it all works, but both are different systems that basically do the same thing. The # videos look to be song-specific, and these are then linked to the #Nirvana account.

For example, I search for Nirvana's "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle."

I can tell immediately that none of the videos on the first page are official uploads. What I'm going to do now is add a pound sign in front of the title I just typed:

#Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle

The page still looks essentially the same, however, what this will do is increase your chances of finding the video content that is licensed to YouTube by the whomever the rights-holder(s) is/are. After adding the # sign, it's not until I get to page three in the search results that I find the #Nirvana channel that tells me this: "Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group International." By choosing that video, I at least have a greater certainty that the song will remain available in years to come, as it was legitimately provided to YouTube by the label. All of the # videos have this similar look where the background is faded.

Generally, this is useful when you can't find official content from an artist, label, or through Vevo. Now, let's say that the label ends up going under in a few years or the license expires and the videos get deleted anyway. That's okay, because an unofficial video is vastly more susceptible to being deleted due to copyright than a label going under or YouTube losing a license.

Sure, I guess in a way, it's a gamble that YouTube will even be around in 30 years, so all this effort may, in fact, be moot. But that's no way to look at things, especially when you're trying to reach a new audience with music they wouldn't otherwise be inclined to check out.