After taking over the world of audio, Spotify is now coming for music videos. Starting today, some premium users will be able to enjoy music videos straight from the app.
Music videos on Spotify is still in beta and is limited to just 11 countries.
- The UK
- Brazil
- Germany
- Indonesia
- Italy
- Kenya
- Netherlands
- Columbia
- Poland
- Philippines
- Sweden
If you are a premium user from any other of these countries, you can now play videos from the “Now Playing” section.
For this, Spotify has added a new “Switch to Video” toggle to its iOS, Android, desktop, and TV app.
Upon turning on the video mode, the toggle will switch to “Switch to Audio” to revert back to audio mode.
On Spotify, music videos play where covert art would normally be—above the music title and artist name.
You can switch to full screen using the icon at the bottom right or by turning your phone into landscape mode.
For now, Spotify’s video catalog is quite limited to videos from select artists. The notable names include Beyonce, Dua Lipa, Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat, and Ice Spice.
Music videos will serve as another way for listeners to engage with artists, just like artist bios, live events, and lyrics that came before it.
The service has experimented with visual formats like Clips and Canvas in the past. However, the videos come directly from Spotify’s server this time, as the company is not using embedded links or third-party services.
So, it will be interesting to see how this Spotify addition will affect platforms like YouTube, which has been the go-to platform for music videos — both for artists and fans.
Even if Spotify expands its video catalog, it will still remain a music streaming platform first. As such, it’s difficult to win over YouTube, which is built around videos.
It also plays music videos even if you aren’t signed up for its premium users — unlike Spotify.
It is still unclear whether Spotify plans to pay artists for their videos, while YouTube already does.
Music Vidoes is among the slew features Spotify has announced in recent times. Other include Miniplayer, AI Playlist, and video courses.
