YouTube is a wonderful source of modern entertainment. No matter what you’re looking for, you can probably find it on YouTube with just a few quick searches. From the largest brands in the world to small, independent operations, it seems that everyone is on this video-sharing platform.
Using YouTube to find kids’ Christian music, or music from any other genre, is a popular option for parents, but there is one problem—most of the songs will drive you crazy! If you are going to use YouTube to effectively find great music that everyone in the family can enjoy, you’ll need to have a strategy. Below, we’ll outline the strategy that we suggest to quickly find great music options. As you go, be sure to subscribe to the channels that you find are delivering quality content so you can easily return to them time and time again. Let’s get started!
The scale of YouTube is massive and can be overwhelming. If you were to just search “kid’s music” or something similar, you’d be thrown into a maze of results that could take hours to sort through and untangle. Therefore, it’s best to be more specific with your initial search so you can find some of the best children’s music YouTube has to offer. Is there a YouTube kids’ music channel? Not officially, but with so many great songs on the platform, you can easily build your own collection.
For example, you might want to start out searching for Christian music for kids. Using that modifier to specify the genre of music you’d like to find, you’ll narrow the search dramatically and get closer to your target. Bible songs for kids are great because of the uplifting, positive message that they deliver from one song to the next.
Once you have done some searching for kids’ music within the genre that you have in mind, you may find that you still have more options to pick from than you would like. In that case, you can again modify your search by adding something that speaks to the age of the child. For example, you might include terms like “pre-K,” “preschool,” “Kindergarten,” or “grade school” in your search.
The sorting that is done by adding these terms to your search might not be perfect, but they will help. One of our albums is a great example of how this concept can work to your advantage. Go Fish offers a popular album titled Party Like a Preschooler, meaning adding the word “preschool” to your search is more likely to point you in this direction.
Now that you’ve done a few YouTube searches, you are probably noticing a pattern. Some of the same content producers are probably coming up again and again, and you can assume that those channels are among the leaders in the space.
To make a quick list of the top channels in the niche that you are searching, try advancing your technique a little further. After you perform a search, such as “Christian music for preschoolers,” use the filter function on YouTube to see channel results rather than videos. If you do that, you’ll see Go Fish displayed as one of the channels offering Christian songs for kids, along with some of the other leaders in this space. Take a moment to click around on the various channels and make a list of five or so that you want to explore further.
Finally, after spending some time winding through the YouTube search results, you are ready to listen to some music! Using your collected list of channels, set aside some time by yourself—not with the kids just yet—to listen to some of the popular songs on each channel and see what you think. Specifically, evaluate the music on the following points:
Is it fun? If you want this music to engage your children, it needs to be fun first and foremost. So, take note of how enjoyable the tunes and lyrics seem to be, and consider moving on from channels that produce relatively boring, predictable songs.
Do you like it? Getting back to the overall point of this article, you are trying to find music that you will be able to listen to along with your children. So, don’t just think about what your kids will like, but also include your personal opinion in the evaluation.
What message does it deliver? Whether you have picked out Christian music or songs from another genre, you’ll need to think about what the lyrics are saying and whether or not that’s a message that you will be comfortable delivering to your kids.
If you can invest some time into this process, you should come away with a good understanding of which channels deliver music that is a good fit for your family and which ones can be excluded.
Most likely, you’ll wind up using music from more than one channel to entertain your kids, and one of the best ways to manage all of the music you find is through the use of a custom playlist on YouTube. When logged into your account, you can start a new playlist and add videos that you want to have available to show your kids at any time.
You might start this playlist with just a few songs with the intention that it will grow over time as you get a better and better idea of what your family enjoys—and as your favorite channels release new music in the future. Soon enough, you’ll find that you have a surprisingly large catalog of great songs at your disposal. Whether they are used for evening dance parties in the living room after dinner has finished or long car rides when everyone is getting a little antsy, this is a nice tool to have in your parental back pocket.
As mentioned above, your playlist is likely to grow as time passes and you find more and more songs to include. Not only that, but you might find that you can remove some songs that you picked out initially that just don’t seem to be connecting with your kids. Like anything else, this is going to work better if you remain engaged with it and continue to make adjustments and improvements rather than just letting it sit and get stale.
There is nothing quite like exposing kids to music for the educational, creative benefits it can deliver—as well as just being fun! That fun should be shared by the whole family, which means you need to find songs that your kids will love (and that you won’t hate). For that, we’d love for you to give the kids’ Bible songs from Go Fish a try, along with our library of secular tunes! Our album Party Like a Preschooler is a hit with kids and parents alike.
You can find us on YouTube in addition to streaming platforms like Spotify, Amazon Music, and Apple Music. Give us a try—we think you’ll like what you hear!
