Spotify is adding music videos to its mobile and desktop apps in some markets. They’re tightly integrated with the company’s music library, as the streaming giant lets you seamlessly switch between audio and music videos in its mobile and desktop apps.
However, Music Video is currently only available in beta in 11 selected markets, with the US not participating in the initial rollout. Here’s the full list of countries where you can find the music video starting today: Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Poland, Philippines, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
“For this beta launch, we selected these markets based on a number of criteria, including market size and availability of local content support… Stay tuned as we look to expand our music video catalog and improve availability in more countries “Sten Garmark, global vice president of consumer experience at Spotify, said in an email.
In addition to residing in one of these countries, music videos require an active premium subscription. Free users still need to go to YouTube to watch music videos.
Here’s how it works. Music videos can start from the Now Playing screen, rather than directly searching for music videos or browsing videos in a separate section of the app. When you are listening to a song with a music video, you can click the “Switch to Video” button to…switch to the video.
The music video plays from the beginning (even if you are in the middle of the track) and the album artwork is replaced. If you want to watch the video in full screen, you can rotate your phone to landscape orientation.
For this feature, Spotify isn’t just embedding YouTube videos or partnering with third-party companies. The company hosts these videos and delivers them directly to users without any advertising. The company did not respond when asked about royalties from playing songs in a video format compared to playing them in an audio streaming format.
If you want to return to background listening, you can click the “Switch to Audio” button to close the music video. If you finish watching the music video, Spotify will play the next song in the queue as audio.
On desktop, music videos appear in the right column, which contains information about the current song and artist. Spotify says the feature will also work on TVs, which makes sense. As a reminder, the company has released apps for Apple TV, Android TV, Fire TV devices, game consoles, and multiple smart TV models.
Initially, only a limited number of music videos will be available on Spotify. But the company has secured distribution rights to add more titles in the future.
“In our initial beta launch, we are starting with a limited subset of our full catalog, which includes thousands of music videos. Within this subset, we aim to prioritize a broad range of genres and artists in our distribution markets ,” Gamak said.
The timing of this feature is interesting, as Universal Music Group pulled its songs from TikTok following a dispute over royalties. With music videos, Spotify is adding more video content to its app, beyond Clips (short videos of artists talking to fans) and Canvas (looping album artwork).
Meanwhile, Spotify is catching up with other streaming services by making music videos available on YouTube Music when you search for songs or browse artist pages. Apple Music also offers music videos in a separate section on each artist page. However, in both cases, switching from audio to video is not easy.
Image Source: Spotify
