Membership badges are one of the perks offered for paid memberships of a YouTube channel. Essentially, they are a token of gratitude from the content creator to those who support their work. Verification badges, on the other hand, are gray checkmarks (or music notes) reserved specifically for channels that have been manually verified by YouTube. This is not the same as having a verified account: this is a symbol of authenticity and it lets you distinguish yourself from impostors on the platform. Think CNN, Mariah Carey, this sort of level. As a baseline, YouTube requires you to have more than 100 000 subscribers and to “be authentic” and to “be complete” to get you verified.