Good news: Spotify is finally adding music videos to its catalog. Bad news: The music videos are probably not available where you live.
According to TechCrunch, the company has rolled out its beta for music video support, but only in 11 countries: Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, the Netherlands, Poland, the Philippines, Sweden, and the UK. If you live outside of those areas, you won’t be able to access music videos right now. You’ll just need to use the app as you normally would, and try to forget that the videos are in there—somewhere.
On the plus side, Spotify does have plans to roll out music video support to more territories, in addition to more videos. There isn’t a timeline for when this will happen, nor an indication which countries will be next.
It isn’t enough to simply live in one of these supported territories. In order to watch music videos in your Spotify app on mobile or desktop, you’ll also need to subscribe to Spotify Premium. Assuming you do pay for Spotify, you’ll now see a “Switch to Video” option appear whenever you play a song with a compatible video. The video will appear where you’d usually find the album art, and will start playing from the beginning. You can return to audio-only from the “Switch to Audio” option, but if you let the video play through, Spotify will automatically play whatever song is next in your queue.
As Mashable notes, you can also find videos on an artist’s page, located in a video carousel. Our sister site was able to find videos for artists like Beyoncé, Dua Lipa, Doja Cat, Charli XCX, RAYE, and Reneé Rapp.
These videos aren’t being piped into the app via YouTube or some other external source. They’re all hosted on Spotify directly, which means you shouldn’t run into any ads or interruptions. (You are a Spotify Premium user, after all.) Spotify did not tell TechCrunch how the company will be dealing with royalties, but hopefully artists will receive a fair cut whenever you watch one of their videos.
Spotify is taking aim at YouTube
I can’t imagine YouTube is too happy about this development. Spotify users obviously default to their app of choice for audio, but in lieu of a catalog of videos, YouTube has long been the natural choice whenever you want to watch the visual version of a song. While free users will still flock to YouTube for their video needs, there will be fewer reasons for Premium subscribers to do so, especially as Spotify adds more videos and more supported territories. And since Spotify hosts these videos themselves, subscribers won’t have to worry about ads and YouTube won’t see passive income from users pulling from their platform.
While this change likely won’t have much effect on Apple Music, which also offers videos, it’ll likely leach some business from YouTube, while offering subscribers something new without a commensurate increase in their monthly subscription cost. Bad for Google, but good for Spotify users. (At least, once it lands in their area.)
