Spotify Is Turning Into YouTube?

I'm not really one to hype things up, but this might be one of Spotify's most significant updates in a while for several reasons. But, if you haven't heard the news yet, uh Spotify's opening direct video uploads for music videos and live performances directly in Spotify for artists. You can upload videos, not just music videos, but live performances, studio sessions, covers, official music videos, and uh later down they should actually show more. Essentially, you can upload any video. You can tag a song in it, even someone else's song if you're doing a cover, and those videos will generate royalties and may be eligible for charting. >> [music] >> Which um this is significant, right? You've been able to distribute music videos to Spotify for a little while, depending on what country you lived in if if you've lived outside of the US for I think over a year, uh maybe even two. Inside of the US, less than a year. Uh I don't know if I forget the exact milestone. But, and then they've had features like Clips where you could add little short-form kind of TikTok-style videos to a song, and Canvases which have been out for years. Um but, they've all been very limited in different ways. This is just straight-up, like if you had a YouTube channel attached to your Spotify. Like, you can you can essentially add any type of video that you would upload on YouTube to Spotify. Um and they're even saying right here in this this article, which I'll link to this article down below as well, so if you can read this yourself, um this steps up Spotify's challenge to YouTube, which dominates music video streaming globally. Which, you know, obviously, right? YouTube is the dominant player when it comes to music videos. Um I just went to Indie Week, which is a music conference in in New York that happens every year. Uh it was a great time. And if I met you there, say hi in the comments. But, [laughter] I said I talked to several people who were all talking about how they feel like Spotify's next big play was coming for YouTube to try to become more of a video streaming platform and then almost all platforms going like fast forward a couple years are going to be focusing on becoming video platforms because of how much YouTube has been dominating in that space. Um, and which makes sense, but it was just kind of shocking that bam, I think this was yesterday this post came out, Spotify is just opening this up to um, a whole bunch of people. Like they said somewhere in this article, yeah, it be it began on Wednesday the 17th. And they said tens of thousands of beta artists now have the option. So they're still saying delivery through labels and distributors. Like for example, if you're on DistroKid and use DistroVid, that's the primary delivery path for obviously audio, but also video content. But tens of thousands of artists have access to this beta for this feature. Um, and the hope is that this rolls out fairly quickly to the broader public. Um, at least that's my personal hope. And I do actually have access to an artist that has this feature. Um, there's not too much to show, but essentially you come here into this like video section where you would upload canvases or clips before, and you click on upload video. I'm just going to hide my screen here because it's going to show some stuff. Then you get to this video thing. We can upload maximum 20 minutes 50 GB. So Spotify is not joking here, right? This is like this is full-blown video content. Um, 10 uh has to be 180 pixels or higher, but up to 50 GB. It must contain audio and moving images. So you can't have like an image only video, which makes sense because what's the point of that? That's just listening to a song on Spotify at that point. Um, and I want to I want to quickly just go ahead and see what happens if I choose a video. I'm not actually going to upload anything because this is not my music account here. >> [laughter] >> Essentially we can choose if it's a cover or not and you can tag the song to the video, which is great. And then you get a little preview over here once it's done processing. So, now I'm going to click next. And you get to go ahead and fill in the rest of the stuff. You get a video title, you get to tag a version, and this is where you get to see the full list of videos. So, um official music videos, live performance videos including live concerts, studio sessions, unplugged sets, cover performances, alternate versions, music video with visuals that differ from the official version like a dance video, demo previewing an unreleased or early version of a song, or anything else. So, it it seems like Spotify just wants to be if you have a video where there's any form of music in it whatsoever, this is that. Um and so, yeah, I'm not going to go further cuz I don't want to accidentally upload this random video on my computer to this artist's um Spotify account. Um because that wouldn't be good. But, it's it shows that some people do have this now. Like, I just I went opened up my Spotify artist and I just clicked one of the one of like the larger artists that I had access to. And not even a huge one. I think the artist is like 200,000 monthly listeners, which is big, but it's not like major label big, right? That's still a very small quote unquote indie artist at that stage. Um Spotify gave a bunch of cool stats about this that um they're saying that, you know, streaming leads to more listening, which I I I buy totally. They're saying that if you stream a video, you're going to stream that song 64% more over the following 3 weeks, and you're 1.4 times more likely to save, share, or add it to a playlist. Those listeners then go on to stream the rest of the artist's catalog 57% more than the same period. So, their their argument is that um video consumption drastically increases music consumption, which shouldn't be a surprise to literally anyone, but that's what it is. And they do have a full video if you want to walk through. They have a 2-minute demo showing how you upload stuff, which is basically what I just showed you in in back end, but they show you everything not blurred out, so I highly recommend if you check out this article, click go and uh do that. And here they clarify where these videos show up. So, these videos can appear in Spotify's personalized video playlist, which is just like an algorithmic video playlist, videos for you, and then editorial playlists such as today's top videos, live performances, and they can also service on your profile, release pages, and now playing. So, they have algorithmic video recommendation, right? The personalized video playlist in videos for you, and then they have the normal places you would find it if you're already checking out an artist. Now, one thing I suspected is uh this feature is coming out, they're ending support for new clips uploads, which I noticed when I went to see if my band had this new feature. I went to go to the music video section, and I saw that I don't have clips anymore. Like I will I uploaded a handful of clips, and I meant to go back in and just dump clips for every song on there, and I noticed that I didn't have access to anymore. So, I was ready to hit up hit up Sam over at Spotify and be like, "Hey, like you gave me clips before. Like, did you have to take it away for some reason?" Um and then I read the bottom of this article, and I saw that uh clips is done, and that's transitioning into just a video tab. Um interesting note here, videos are all landscape, um which is a weird caveat. So, like, they're really not going for vertical video. They're going for long-form horizontal video, and I it it is curious, right? It's like, why are they abandoning vertical live video when everyone else in the industry has gone into that? Maybe they realized they couldn't compete, and maybe they realized there was way more money to be made in full-length long-form video, which is again, that's not news, either. Everyone knows that if you're a YouTuber, you get paid way more per view than if you're a TikToker. Or YouTube Shorts pays way, way less on YouTube than full-blown YouTube videos. So, maybe that's the game. Um no one knows what the revenue model is going to be like on Spotify either, but my assumption is that it's going to be not too different from consuming music, right? It's like if you watch a video, it's it's a it's a stream just like if you listen to a song, it's a stream. Uh just like on YouTube, if you watch a video and you see an ad, you there's a there's a revenue breakdown there, right? It's it's a normal split, but no one knows is the revenue split for Spotify video the same as it is for music. Um maybe that's been released somewhere, but I have a feeling it just hasn't been announced yet. This is kind of the wild west. This is the only streaming platform to offer anything remotely like this. Like it's just full-blown YouTube attached to your Spotify. Uh there is a cool stat or feature at the bottom of this. Um Spotify is also talked with festival promoters over the rights to carry live concert video, which would be a another big move. That would be kind of innovative. So, in my opinion, this is an exciting move. This is one of the biggest changes that Spotify's ever made, right? Like on YouTube, they have this cool thing where you have an official artist channel where you can upload your videos and your music catalogs right there. But it's always felt like this kind of disjointed thing because like in like in YouTube Music, it's kind of linked, but you still have to upload on another app. So, it's it's still always felt a little disjointed. Um but it's been good, right? YouTube Music and YouTube official artist channel, it's a cool thing. But doing this in Spotify, Spotify is the biggest player, right? There there was this article that came out recently. There's almost a billion people paying for music streaming. Uh Spotify has 300 million paying customers. YouTube Music is about 100 million. Apple Music is about 100 million. So, Spotify has like more than the next three players combined not including uh Tencent over in China. So, um huge for the biggest platform in the world to add video because I think every artist would just love the ability to like cool, I can upload my music videos, my performance videos, this cool behind-the-scenes stuff. Um hopefully fans dig it. And hopefully long-term there's more cool things they can do with this. But anyways, I'm excited about it. Um I hope they also add clips back someday, too, because short-form videos would also be nice to have back. But let me know what you think in the comments below. What do you think about Spotify getting more into video? And also, if you want to learn how you can market your music either on Spotify or any of the platform, check out this video to see how you can do rather this playlist to see how you can do exactly just that. And if you watch this video, that's whatever YouTube thinks you should watch. But anyways, thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one. Bye.