Spotify has taken a major step into the music video space by allowing artists to upload full-length videos directly to the platform via their Spotify for Artists dashboard.
The new feature, currently in beta, allows musicians to share live performances, studio sessions, covers, and official music videos. Crucially, Spotify has confirmed that these video views are “royalty-bearing and may be chart-eligible”, marking a direct challenge to YouTube’s long-standing dominance in global music video streaming.
Moving beyond labels and distributors
While Spotify first introduced music videos to select markets in 2024 and expanded them to Premium users in the US and Canada in late 2025, artists previously had to rely on record labels or third-party distributors to get their visual content onto the platform.
The direct-upload rollout gives “tens of thousands” of beta artists immediate control over their video content. While delivery through labels and distributors remains the primary path for most audio and video on Spotify, this update gives independent creators a powerful new tool.
The data behind the video push
According to Spotify, incorporating video content significantly boosts an artist’s overall streaming numbers. The streaming giant shared several key statistics highlighting why visual media matters:
- Increased track streams: After watching a video, listeners stream that specific song 64% more over the following three weeks.
- Higher engagement: Video viewers are 1.4 times more likely to save, share, or add the track to a playlist.
- Catalogue discovery: Listeners go on to stream the rest of an artist’s catalogue 57% more over the same three-week period.
- Super listener boost: Streams from an artist’s most dedicated fans—or “super listeners”—rise by 62% after watching a video, adding an average of an hour and 40 minutes of extra listening time.
Because these videos generate royalties, artists stand to earn money from the video views themselves, as well as the spike in audio streams that follows.
Where the videos will appear
Once an artist uploads a video, it can surface across several areas of the app, including:
- Personalised feeds: The video playlist, Videos For You.
- Editorial playlists: Curated lists such as Today’s Top Videos, Live Performances, and Video Covers.
- Artist profiles: Directly on the artist’s main page, release pages, and the Now Playing view.
Early beta testers have already begun utilizing the feature. Indie artist Hazlett uploaded a live performance of Blame the Moon, pop trio We Three shared a cover of Drops of Jupiter, and Bebe Rexha uploaded the official music video for her track Hysteria.
Format requirements and the end of Clips
For artists looking to participate, Spotify has laid out clear guidelines for the beta:
Video requirements: Videos must be uploaded in landscape (16:9) format. Visualisers, lyric videos, full-length multi-song concerts, and videos without music are not currently supported.
Once a landscape video is uploaded, Spotify will automatically generate short-form previews to help promote the content across the app.
As a result of this new focus on full-length video, Spotify is ending support for new uploads to Clips, the short-form video feature it introduced in 2023. Existing Clips will remain on the platform, but the “Clips” tab on artist profiles will gradually transition into a broader “Video” tab.
A gradual rollout
This is not Spotify’s first experiment with direct creator uploads; the company trialled direct music distribution for independent artists back in 2018 before closing the programme a year later. However, the platform’s video ambitions appear much larger this time, with recent industry reports suggesting Spotify is also in talks with festival promoters to secure rights for live concert videos.
For independent acts who do not yet have access to the beta dashboard, third-party distribution services like DistroKid’s DistroVid have also offered a pathway to upload videos to Spotify since mid-2025.
Spotify plans to expand access to the direct-upload beta gradually, with more artists receiving access to the dashboard throughout the year.
