Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
One of the most common complaints I keep reading from YouTube Music users is that Google treats it and their regular YouTube experience as one and the same. If you like one artist’s songs, you’re now subscribed to their videos as well. If you listen to or search for some music, it’s now part of your YouTube recommendations as well. For the few people who solely (or mostly) use YouTube to watch music videos, that’s fine. But most people have more varied interests than just music videos and end up with an odd mix of two experiences that shouldn’t be merged.
Me? I don’t watch music videos at all, so seeing any YouTube Music content in my regular YouTube feels like unwanted clutter that I have to weed through. Having my video subscriptions littered with artists and bands led me to cull most of my liked artists on Music, then ditch it altogether for Spotify’s more powerful featureset. Then, one day, I realized I was sitting on the perfect cure for that annoying YouTube overlap: multiple channels.
A secondary YouTube channel is like a separate profile
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
Multiple profiles are YouTube’s best hidden and free feature. Anyone with one YouTube account can create multiple channels under the same account (up to 100, according to Google’s support pages) for free. No new Gmail address needed, no new password, and no signing in and out of accounts. Once they do, they have a completely separate YouTube experience from their main account, which essentially functions as a standalone YouTube profile.
Subscriptions, playlists, settings, recommendations, watch history, and search history are completely separate for each channel. Better yet, all Premium benefits carry across them, so you need to pay once on your Google account, and all of your channels benefit from YouTube Premium’s perks. I get no ads, background playback, and smart downloads on all of my profiles for the price of one.
A separate profile lets you start fresh, pick different history and search settings, all while retaining the same Premium perks.
I’ve been using this multiple profile trick for over a year to separate my regular YouTube experience from my more sporadic experience. Any random topic I’m temporarily and mildly interested in goes into my secondary profile, any new purchase I’m researching, any silly video friends send me that I want to check out but fear might be outside my usual interests — all of these go into the secondary profile. I don’t want these in my watch or search history, and I don’t want to confuse the recommendations algorithm with them.
I then realized that I could use this same trick to keep my YouTube Music experience separate from my main YouTube account.
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