@ReneSC BitFrequencies @Eugene Hickman @Terrence Bullock @Theo G Thank you all so much for the honest feedback. It genuinely gave me a push to act when I was feeling pretty discouraged after the YPP rejection. Today I uploaded my first album to DistroKid. Now I’m waiting for it to arrive on streaming platforms, especially YouTube Music, so I can link the individual tracks and playlists from the 1-hour compilations. The longer-term plan is to connect everything through an Official Artist Channel and let the compilation audience gradually discover the individual releases too. I’m also planning to set up a Ko-fi page where people can directly buy and download the albums. It may become a small additional income stream while I build the streaming side properly. Your comments made me rethink the whole artist concept. At the start I was mainly testing keywords and formats that already worked in this niche. I never expected the compilations to start growing this quickly, but the YPP rejection made me realize the channel needs to feel less automated and much more like a real artist project. For now, I’m not appealing. I’m going to rebuild the channel identity: more varied titles and thumbnails, a clearer artist concept, community posts, proper releases through DistroKid, and a more intentional presentation overall. Then I’ll reapply to YPP later. Honestly, I’m not very confident they’ll accept the channel after seeing the existing catalogue, but I’ll still give it a real attempt rather than giving up completely. I also considered using DistroKid’s Social Media Pack and Content ID to monetize the existing compilations through the individual tracks. But after reading YouTube’s policies more carefully, I realized that doing this after being rejected from YPP could be treated as trying to circumvent YouTube monetization eligibility through a third party. I don’t want to risk violating YouTube’s rules or putting the channel at risk, so I decided not to do that.

@Terrence Bullock Are you referring to the Ko-fi part? There are downloaders for pretty much every streaming platform, but I’ve often seen people in this niche asking if they can buy an album/compilation as MP3 files. That’s where the idea came from. Ko-fi also allows donations, so I see it as a small experiment rather than the main plan. If it doesn’t lead anywhere, I’ll survive - I mainly want to build around DistroKid and the streaming releases.

Congrats @Theo G , that’s an incredible result! Quick question: did you get accepted into YPP on your first application, or did you have to appeal or make changes to the channel? My AI music channel was recently rejected despite reaching 144K views and 24.8K watch hours in 90 days: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrbPjiT-4svEbeGxN8zsJ3A/ If you have a moment to look, I’d really appreciate any advice on what might have helped your channel pass the review.