In certain markets, Spotify integrates music videos in some countries. Spotify is integrating music videos into its desktop and mobile applications. Since the industry leader in streaming allows users to quickly flip between audio and music videos in its desktop and mobile apps, they are closely linked with the company’s music catalog.
Unfortunately, at this time, music videos are only accessible in beta in 11 specific areas; the United States is not included in this initial deployment. The entire list of nations where music videos will be available as of right now is as follows: Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Poland, Philippines, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
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“For this beta rollout, we chose these markets based on a number of criteria including market size and the availability of local content support . . . Stay tuned as we hope to expand the catalog of music videos and increase availability to more countries,” read an email from Sten Garmark, VP Global Head of Consumer Experience at Spotify.
Music videos need to have a valid premium subscription in addition to being residents of one of those nations. For free users to see music videos, they still need to go to YouTube.
This is how it will operate. The “Now Playing” feature allows users to start music videos instead of looking for them specifically or viewing them in a different area of the program. You can “switch to video” by tapping on the “Switch to Video” button when you’re listening to a song with a music video.
The album artwork is replaced with the music video, which begins playing at the beginning of the song (regardless of where you were in the song). You can turn your phone to landscape mode to see the video in full-screen mode.
Spotify isn’t only collaborating with a third party or embedding a YouTube video for this feature. The videos are being directly hosted by the company and are being provided to its viewers without any advertisements. The corporation did not respond to a question regarding royalties when music is streamed in video format as opposed to audio.
You can click the “Switch to Audio” button to turn off the music video and return to background listening. Furthermore, Spotify will play the audio version of the following song in your queue if you watch the music video through to the finish.
When viewing music videos on a desktop, details about the current song and artist are displayed in the right-hand column. According to Spotify, the feature is also compatible with TVs, which is a great place for it. Recall that the company has produced apps for several smart TV models, gaming consoles, Apple TV, Android TV, and Fire TV devices.
There will initially be a restricted quantity of music videos accessible on Spotify. However, the business has already obtained the rights to distribute more videos in the future.
We’re starting with a small portion of the entire catalog—which has hundreds of music videos—in our first beta rollout. We tried to include as many different genres and performers from our launch markets as possible in this subset, according to Garmark.
It’s intriguing that this feature release coincides with Universal Music Group removing its songs from TikTok because of a disagreement over royalties. Spotify is expanding its video content offering on its app with music videos, going beyond Clips—brief movies featuring musicians interacting with fans—and Canvas—looping album artwork.
Besides the fact that Spotify integrates music videos in some countries, the company is also catching up to other streaming services at the same time as YouTube Music offers music videos when you search for a song or visit an artist’s profile. Each artist page on Apple Music features a unique area dedicated to music videos. However, switching from audio to video is more difficult in both situations.