As an artist, if you distribute your work to YouTube via DistroKid, we send your work to YouTube Music. YouTube Music is a music streaming service.
When you distribute your work to YouTube Music, your music also generates what are called Art Tracks, which are still image, audio only releases that populate a Topic Channel.
Topic Channels show exactly what your YouTube Music Artist Profile has available for streaming. The only difference is that Topic Channels are available on YouTube's main website, whereas your artist profile is available on YouTube Music.
You're paid for each monetized play of your music. A "monetized" play is when YouTube displays an ad on the video, or when a YouTube Music paying subscriber listens (in which case you're paid, pro-rata, based on how much they're paying and what percentage of the time they listened to your tracks).
Delivering your music to YouTube Music also ensures that you are eligible to turn your own channel into an Official Artist Channel, which comes with a myriad of additional perks! You can read more about Official Artist Channel's here.
YouTube Music is currently available in the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Russia, Canada, Ireland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and South Korea, and will be available anywhere YouTube has a subscription music service as new territories are supported. If you're trying to play YouTube Music Art Track videos from outside of these supported territories, you may see a message that the content is not available.
Here's some more information:
http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2014/11/youtube-music-2014.html
http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/12/7201969/youtube-music-key-new-subscription-service
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