For all its early flaws, there has always been one key feature YouTube Music stands for long before anyone else: access to all the music videos. With Spotify’s latest announcement, this advantage might soon fizzle out, though. The Swedish streaming giant has announced that it will start rolling out music videos in beta for select regions and titles.
Starting today, Spotify is rolling out music videos to some of its paid subscribers. The videos available across all platforms, whether it’s iOS, Android, a desktop, or a TV. In this early pilot phase, there is only a small selection of music videos, among them videos from Ed Sheeran, Doja Cat, Ice Spice, Aluna, and Asake.
Supported titles will show a new “Switch to Video” toggle in the Now Playing view that will start the video from the beginning. Switching back to audio seems more seamless, though. Spotify writes, “Want to return to background listening? Simply press ‘Switch to Audio.’” You can watch the video in landscape, and there are buttons for skipping back and forth by 15 second increments.
For now, Spotify is rolling out music videos to a few select regions only: UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Brazil, Colombia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Kenya are on board. Given that it’s a staged rollout, it may still take a while to reach your Premium account even if you live in one of these countries.
Spotify makes clear that it could still tweak how the feature works based on feedback from artists and users over the course of the beta. The company ends its announcement with a statement that suggests we may not have to wait too long for music videos to arrive in more regions: “Stay tuned as we hope to expand the catalog of music videos and bring the feature to more users and countries.”
While YouTube Music has a close association with music videos just based on its brand and history, it’s not the only music streaming service that has offered videos so far. For example, Tidal is another big service that gives you access to a big catalog of music videos, just like Apple Music does, too. There are also dedicated services like Vevo that specialize in videos.
In that sense, Spotify is late to the party. Given that it’s the most popular music streaming service out there, it may still help give music videos even more prominence than they already have on other platforms.
Maybe if we start telling people the brain is an app they will start using it!
