Spotify is rolling out the ability to upload full-length videos to its service via the Spotify for Artists dashboard. It’s the latest move that emphasises its direct competition with YouTube, as well as social-media platforms.
This is in beta for now, with artists who are part of it able to upload official music videos but also live performances, studio sessions and covers – “all of which are royalty-bearing and may be chart-eligible”.
Music videos aren’t new to Spotify: labels and distributors have been able to release them on the platform for a year now. What’s new is that artists will also be able to upload long-form videos directly too.
In its announcement, Spotify offered some encouragement for musicians to do that, saying that “one thing we’ve seen consistently is that streaming videos leads to more listening” – with some stats to back that up.
“After streaming a video, listeners stream that song 64% more often over the following three weeks on average. They’re also 1.4x more likely to save it, share it, or add it to a playlist,” claimed Spotify. “And they go on to stream the rest of your catalog 57% more during that same period.”
Once uploaded, artists’ videos will be found in a dedicated tab in their profiles, but also on Spotify’s homepage, release pages, its Now Playing view and in push notifications to fans.
They may also make it into its algorithmic ‘Videos For You’ playlist, which is personalised for each listener (well, viewer now) based on their tastes. Spotify also now has playlists called ‘Today’s Top Videos’, ‘Live Performances’ and ‘Video Covers’ to showcase full-length footage.
There are some rules and recommendations. Spotify is advising that videos should be in landscape 16:9 format (sorry, kids!) and for now isn’t allowing “visualizers, lyric videos, multi-song concerts, and videos without music”.
The news also comes with the sunsetting of an existing feature: ‘Clips’. This launched in 2023 as a way for artists to add 30-second videos to their profiles and album pages, talking about new music and offering behind-the-scenes footage.
“To support this next chapter of video on Spotify, we’ll be ending support for new Clips uploads,” explained the company.
“Any Clips you’ve already uploaded will remain available. Over time, the Clips tab on your artist profile will transition to the Video tab, which will become the home for both music videos and previously uploaded Clips.”
The new full-length uploads beta isn’t open to all artists yet, but they can join a waitlist to get access.
As we said, this does feel like Spotify parking its tanks on YouTube’s lawn, given the latter’s hard-earned reputation as the home of long-form music videos online – including the performances, studio sessions and covers specifically mentioned by Spotify today.
Spotify is also reportedly talking to festivals about livestreaming rights – something YouTube (and also Amazon Music) has been invested in for several years already.
This is a two-way slugfest, though. YouTube has just launched its ‘Music Nights’ series of concerts, filming exclusive gigs packed with an artist’s superfans.
That’s straight out of Spotify’s recent playbook of artist partnerships, but its long-form uploads beta is opening another avenue of competition between the world’s two biggest freemium music platforms.
There’s another angle here that may be worth chewing over. For signed artists, official music videos will, we’re fairly sure, still be uploaded by labels and distributors. But with the other kinds listed by Spotify, is it going to be opening up a direct royalties relationship with artists?
It tried this back in 2018 with another beta: a tool for artists to upload their (audio) music directly to Spotify. Less than a year later the tool was shut down, amid plenty of speculation that Spotify’s biggest label partners had pushed back hard on the idea.
Could today’s announcement be a revival of that idea, but in a way that’s less threatening to the labels? Discuss…
