Spotify will introduce music videos to compete with YouTube Premium

Spotify continues to add improvements to its service to attract even more users.

Oliver Thansan
Oliver Thansan
04 July 2023 Tuesday 10:56
6 Reads
Spotify will introduce music videos to compete with YouTube Premium

Spotify continues to add improvements to its service to attract even more users. A few months ago, the streaming platform changed its user experience to assimilate it to the TikTok model, and recently announced that they plan to include a significant improvement in audio quality, to catch up with competitors like Tidal.

The last bet is to include the videos of the songs to match what Apple Music does and start to 'attack' YouTube Premium head-on, which continues to have the largest share of the digital music market. Spotify wants to continue growing to dominate this market niche and now it does so by offering the complete video clips of the songs.

After the improvement in sound quality, now they go a step further in their claim to expand horizons and are committed to transforming the user experience so that beyond listening to their favorite artists, they can also see them. Until now, Spotify offered cyclical GIFs on some music tracks or for podcasts, but they didn't last more than 30 seconds.

Now what they want to include are long videos, between 2 and 5 minutes, and they are in negotiations with several potential providers to carry it out and include it in the app. At the moment there is no closed agreement with anyone, nor an upcoming release date, but according to Bloomberg reports, they do not intend to delay it for long.

Spotify is constantly renewing itself and proof of this is that in March they launched the new 'home' or start screen, very similar to the one we can see on TikTok, giving the platform a new look.

The inclusion of music videos seems the most natural next step in its development, just like Apple Music, which has been including video clips on its platform for years. In the short term, this would be its closest competitor since it is the one that offers the most similar service, however, the company's objective is more ambitious and they are focused on competing with YouTube Premium, which is the one that dominates the video sector.

Today, Spotify can't compete with YouTube Premium in that regard because, in addition to including videos, it has an extensive music library with all kinds of artists and genres, and also without ads. However, if Spotify were to find a provider that could provide these videos, everything would start to equalize and even YouTube could lose subscribers to the detriment of the green platform.

As a commercial strategy it seems a logical enough step to try to 'steal' users from YouTube, however not everything is positive since the inclusion of music videos as such does not generate direct income. What it would allow would be for well-known artists to decide to release their video clips on Spotify and thus attract many more users to the app.

In addition, it would not be such an extreme investment for Spotify since it would be done through a provider and therefore would not require expanding its production team.

Everything seems to indicate that the fact that Spotify includes videos is a 'win to win' to continue growing and getting into a market niche that YouTube has dominated, but it remains to be seen how the negotiations with the various providers progress and if it will finally be possible. enjoy the vieoclips on Spotify.