Candice Morrissey, content partnerships manager at YouTube, said: “We have been working with the participants in this pilot to help them display the BBFC’s age ratings on their music videos on YouTube”.
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The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), backed by the Government, is working with video-sharing websites Vevo and YouTube to implement the grading system.
The announcement will see a pilot programme launched by the government in October 2014 made permanent.
During a pilot scheme, 132 videos were submitted to the BBFC by the labels, with 56 rated as a 12 and 53 classified as 15.
Online music videos will be given a rating in the same way as movies, meaning parents and viewers are pre-warned about the sort of content they can expect in the video.
Major UK labels will henceforth send videos to the BBFC for classification ahead of their release and include the resulting ratings before uploading the clips to YouTube and Vevo.
Raunchy videos by British music acts will get cinema-style age ratings online, after 60% of 10 to 17-year-olds told researchers they watch content their parents would not approve of.
“Keeping children safe as they experience and enjoy all the benefits the Internet has to offer is a key priority for this Government’s One Nation approach to help families across Britain”. Those independent UK music labels will now take part in a six-month pilot phase.
The classifications will only be applied to music videos produced by UK record labels however officials hope to extend the censorship to all music videos. “These ratings are in addition to the controls we already provide on YouTube including the ability for uploaders to add age warnings to videos and a restricted mode”.
The online age rating system is a must have for governments and parents that do not have the time to monitor what their children are doing.
Nic Jones of Vevo said the company was committed to making age ratings work “as effectively as possible” and would continue to explore additional age controls.
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The blocking of music on sites might not succeed in modifying teens appetite for “your mother wouldn’t like it” type music, but it could help educate them in the mastery of VPNs, TOR and Torrents.
