Every artist we add gets verified before a single video enters our system, because impersonation on YouTube is more common than most fans expect. The lesson we keep relearning: a handle that reads like an official one proves nothing on its own. Handles get abandoned, reassigned and claimed by strangers, and the name displayed on a channel is simply whatever its owner typed.
So the first check is to open the handle and read what the page actually reports about itself — the channel's real title, not the handle in the address bar. When those two disagree, stop. We have opened handles that looked exactly like a group's official name and found an unrelated channel underneath: a gaming account, a personal fan page, in one case a channel with a completely different name and audience.
The second check is the channel ID, the string starting with UC that never changes even when a handle does. That ID is the artist's real identity on YouTube. The third check is cross-linking: an artist's official website, X account and other verified pages point to their channel, and those links should resolve to the same ID. Impersonators can copy a name and an avatar; they cannot make the artist's own site link to them.
The fourth check is the archive. An official channel's upload history matches the artist's release timeline — music videos on release dates, behind films after the promotions they document, a run of uploads going back years. A channel with a handful of recent reuploads and no history is not the source, whatever it calls itself. If a channel fails any of these, we don't use it, and neither should you when deciding where to watch, comment and stream.