← Blog

I run an AI music channel on YouTube. How do I register the back catalogue?

2026-11-09 · OpenStela

Paste your channel URL into Import from an account on the works page. It lists your 15 most recent videos, marks any you've already registered, and registers the ones you tick in one pass. Anything older than those 15 goes in one video at a time with Paste a link. For the handful of tracks you care most about, also upload the master audio file, because a link record and a file record pin down different things.

Linking the channel itself to your profile is a separate, optional step. Add it and it shows as self-declared. Verify it and it shows as verified, for 90 days at a time. Neither step is needed to register videos. This post walks through all three, and is honest about the one limit you can't get around: the 15-video cap belongs to YouTube's feed, not to us.

What the channel import actually reads

When you paste a channel URL (youtube.com/@yourname, /channel/UC…, /c/… or /user/…), we fetch the channel page once to find its channel ID, then read YouTube's public RSS feed for that channel. That feed is the official, key-free list YouTube publishes for every channel, and it only ever contains the latest 15 uploads. Each entry gives us a video ID, a title, a publish date and a thumbnail. Nothing is written at this stage; the import only reads.

Two practical notes from running it:

• YouTube's feed is flaky. It often fails on the first try, so we retry a few times. If it still won't answer, we read the channel's Videos tab instead. That fallback also stops at 15, but it only has relative dates ("3 weeks ago"), so the list shows no publish dates.
• Videos you have already registered from this account are labelled registered and can't be ticked. The same video can't be registered twice by one account, whatever form the URL takes (watch?v=, youtu.be, /shorts/). If you try, you're shown the date of the first record.

Registering the latest 15 in one pass

1. Open the works page, choose Register a work, then Import from an account.
2. Paste your channel URL and press Read. You'll see up to 15 videos, each with a thumbnail and publish date.
3. Tick the videos you want. Select all and Select none are there for speed.
4. Decide on dates. The box Use the platform's publish date as the creation date copies each video's YouTube date into its record. If you'd rather state the date you finished the track, untick it and type a date, but that one date then applies to every ticked video. If the list showed no dates (the fallback case above), the box has nothing to copy and those records go in without a creation date.
5. Fill in the shared fields: Attribution (the name you publish under; a pen name is fine), Rights (My own work or I hold a licence), and, if you tick This work was made with AI tools, Which tools and Your contribution.
6. Choose whether the works show on your public page, then register. Each ticked video becomes its own record, and the batch is anchored that night.

The catch is step 5. In a batch, the contribution text is the same for every video, and it's frozen into each record for good. "Made this" is a weak sentence to anchor fifteen times. If your videos were made in different ways (some with lyrics you wrote, some fully generated, a few with a re-sung vocal), run the import several times, ticking one group at a time, each with a contribution that's true for that group. There is also a daily limit on how many works one account can register, so a big back catalogue is a job for a few evenings anyway.

Older than the last 15: one link at a time

For everything the feed doesn't show, use Paste a link. Paste the video URL, give it a title if you want one other than YouTube's, and fill in the same fields. Doing this one by one has an upside: you can write a contribution that fits each track and a creation date you actually remember. If you don't remember, leave the date blank. It's your statement, and a guess frozen on a public record helps nobody.

A sensible order: start with the videos that get the most views or that you'd most hate to see re-uploaded, then work backwards. You don't have to register a whole catalogue to get value from the first ten records.

A link record and a file record are not the same thing

This is the part most people miss. When you register a YouTube link, we ask YouTube's oEmbed endpoint about that video and store the reply: the title, the channel name, the channel URL and the thumbnail address, as they were at that moment. The record's fingerprint is the SHA-256 of that reply. It doesn't contain your audio or your video, because YouTube doesn't hand those out.

So the two do different jobs. The link record shows the release: the title and channel name on that date, which is what you'd point to if someone re-uploads your video under their name. The file record shows the master. YouTube re-encodes what you upload, so a downloaded copy of your video won't match your file byte for byte. A copy of the master that leaked from somewhere else will.

For your strongest tracks, register both: the YouTube link, and the mp3 or wav you exported before upload. Registration is free, and each account gets 300 MB of upload space (see pricing). Thirty mp3s fit easily; thirty long wavs won't, so pick the format with that in mind. If you're also releasing the same songs to streaming services, what to register before releasing a Suno album covers the master-first order in more detail.

Each record gets a public page if you choose, a Proof Pack you can download, and an anchored proof that anyone can recompute without us. How a registered work is verified shows the check step by step.

Linking the channel: self-declared by default, verification optional

Under Settings → Music accounts you can add your YouTube channel next to StreetVoice, Suno and SoundCloud. Once added, it appears on your public profile marked as self-declared. That's all you need. Nothing about registering videos depends on it.

If you want the channel marked verified, there are three ways to show you control it:

1. Channel description. Paste the one-time code we give you into your channel's description, press Verify, then delete the code if you like. Once it passes, the code is used up.
2. Channel links. Add a link to your OpenStela account page in the links section of your channel.
3. Sign in with Google. Google asks for read-only YouTube access, we read once which channels that Google account owns, and if the one you declared is among them it passes. The access token isn't stored. The record keeps only the channel ID and name.

Whichever you use, a verification is its own record, anchored that night, and it lasts 90 days. After that the channel goes back to self-declared until you verify again. Be clear about what it shows: that you controlled the channel at that moment. It isn't a statement about who made the videos on it. We only accept the code in fields only the owner can edit; a code pasted into a comment proves nothing, so we don't look there.

YouTube's AI label is a separate question

Registering a video with us doesn't change anything on YouTube, and it isn't a substitute for YouTube's own rules on AI content. YouTube's help page Disclosing use of GenAI content lists "AI generated music" among its examples of content creators need to disclose, using the AI use setting in YouTube Studio. It also links a separate page, Disclose Gen AI usage for music content. Neither page shows a date; we read both on 9 November 2026. Policies change, so read the current versions yourself, and check YouTube's Terms of Service and your AI music tool's terms for what you may upload and monetise. We won't summarise them for you.

On our side, ticking This work was made with AI tools and writing down what you did is the closest counterpart. It doesn't label anything on YouTube; it puts your own description of your part on a dated record. Whether that part is enough for copyright protection is a legal question that depends on where you are. How much do I have to do for an AI work to be protected? goes through what official sources say.

What a back-catalogue registration does and doesn't do

A record shows that a specific page snapshot or file existed on a specific date, under the name you gave, with the contribution you wrote. If someone re-uploads your track, your records give you dates and fingerprints to put in front of the platform or anyone else who asks.

It doesn't establish that you own the music, that your AI tool's terms let you publish it, or that the other upload infringes yours. It doesn't stop anyone from copying, and it doesn't change how YouTube's Content ID or copyright tools treat your videos. If a real dispute comes up, a lawyer in your jurisdiction can tell you how much weight the record carries. This is general information, not legal advice.