Spotify adds music videos to its mobile and desktop apps in select markets. They’re tightly integrated with the company’s music library, as the streaming giant lets you switch between audio and music videos on its mobile and desktop apps.
However, music videos are only available in beta in 11 select markets for now — and the US isn’t part of this initial rollout. Here’s the full list of countries where you’ll find music videos as of today: Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Poland, Philippines, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
“For this beta release, we selected these markets based on a number of criteria, including market size and availability of local content support . . . Stay tuned as we hope to expand our catalog of music videos and increase availability in more countries,” said Spotify’s VP of Global Consumer Experience, Sten Garmark, in an email.
In addition to residing in one of these countries, music videos also require an active premium subscription. Free users still have to go to YouTube to watch music videos.
See how it will work. Instead of searching for music videos directly or browsing videos in a separate section of the app, you can start music videos from the Now Playing screen. When you’re listening to a song that has a music video, you can tap a button that says “Go to Video” to… go to a video.
The music video starts playing from the beginning (even if you were in the middle of the track) and replaces the album art. If you want to see the video in full screen, you can rotate your phone to landscape orientation.
For this feature, Spotify isn’t just embedding a YouTube video or partnering with a third-party company. The company hosts these videos directly and delivers them to its users without any ads. When asked about the rights when playing a song in video format compared to an audio stream, the company did not respond.
If you want to go back to listening in the background, you can press the button that says “Switch to Audio” to mute the music video. And if you watch the music video to the end, Spotify will play the next song in your queue in audio.
On desktop, music videos are displayed in the right column with information about the current song and artist. Spotify says the feature is also available on TVs, where it makes a lot of sense. We remind you that the company released applications for the devices Apple TV, Android TV, Fire TV, game consoles and several smart TV models.
Initially, only a limited number of music videos will be available on Spotify. But the company has already secured distribution rights to add more videos down the road.
“In our initial beta, we’re starting with a limited subset of our full catalog, which includes thousands of music videos. Within this subset, we aimed to prioritize a broad range of genres and artists in our circulation markets,” said Garmark.
The timing of the release of this feature is interesting as Universal Music Group pulled its songs from TikTok after a rights dispute. 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 artworks).
At the same time, Spotify is catching up with other streaming services as music videos are available on YouTube Music when you search for a song or browse an artist page. Apple Music also has music videos in a separate section on each artist page. But in both cases, it’s not that easy to switch from audio to video.
Image Credits: Spotify
