Photo Credit: Spotify
As it battles YouTube for video supremacy – and grapples with an intensifying AI audio avalanche – Spotify is now enabling artists to directly upload full-length music videos, live performance videos, and more.
Spotify announced this latest video expansion, plus a couple adjacent changes, today. At the top level, eligible artists needn’t use a distributor to add their music videos and can instead upload to the platform itself via Spotify for Artists.
With the option having technically rolled out in beta, the focus is currently “on videos tied directly to a specific song or release,” according to Spotify. That requirement aside – “[v]isualizers, lyric videos, multi-song concerts, and videos without music” are a no-go – artists have a few choices.
Specifically, they can directly upload the aforementioned music and live videos as well as covers and acoustic or studio sessions.
Meanwhile, Spotify is set to auto-generate “short-form previews” of full-length videos for use across the platform. As such, it’s “ending support for new Clips uploads,” with existing Clips remaining available and transitioning to the Video tab “[o]ver time.”
Next, the service reiterated that videos can appear in a personalized playlist (Videos for You) and the Today’s Top Videos, Live Performances, and Video Covers editorial playlists.
And on the consumption side, Spotify took the opportunity to rattle off a few stats – after watching a video, “listeners stream that song 64% more often over the following three weeks on average” – in an effort to illustrate videos’ purported value for creatives.
In the bigger picture, the direct-upload pivot is certainly interesting from the perspective of the Spotify v. YouTube video war.
It’s unclear how much of a threat Spotify actually poses here, and YouTube’s video-podcast lead is also worth keeping in mind. On the other hand, direct uploads definitely won’t hurt Spotify’s video positioning, and despite the livestream-concerts arena’s stiffer competition, the platform is reportedly plotting a related buildout as well.
Regarding how direct-upload videos may help Spotify on the artificial intelligence front, it was only in late April that verified badges started distinguishing real artists from those dealing in AI slop.
And that development followed considerable criticism concerning machine-made garbage. Of course, this isn’t to say Spotify made its newest video move with AI profiles in mind.
But it is to say that genuine artist pages are even easier to identify and discover when they feature music videos, live recordings, and covers. Longer term, it seems possible that users (or just subscribers?) will gain the option of filtering profiles accordingly if so inclined.