Since its launch in March of this year, Spotify’s short-form video feature ‘Spotify Clips’, empowers artists to share the creative depth behind their music, in a format that exists in immediate attention-span proximity to the platform’s audio player. Through Clips, Spotify is looking to establish a multimedia extravaganza of engagement, riding on the ever-growing coattails of users’ familiarity with short-form content consumption
From a UX perspective, Spotify make it incredibly simple for fans to engage with their favourite artists’ Clips, immediately faced with a one-click prompt to save the music tagged in the post to their library, or better yet, play it immediately. This sounds obvious, but to put a more conscious spin on it that some may not have, Clips has provided a much needed, more intentional alternative to mindless scrolling.
We’ve seen artists’ content canvassing many types of Clips, continuing to keep things close to the music, with an average Clips post frequency of 1-3 times per week. Some official Clips content suggestions from Spotify are live on their flagship Clips guide, but we want to throw some other ideas your way to consider when posting your next Clips video:
- Live sing-alongs
- ‘Out now’ messages going into the why of a song
- Cutdowns of official/session videos
- Gig & merch announcements
- Clips of live gigs
- Tour diary outtakes
- Mini lyric videos
- ‘BTS’ style clips from shoots, sessions & more
- Spiritual space live recordings
- Inspirational messages
- Short dives into elements of the recording process
- Candid photo montages
- Colourful, in-time visualisers
- Reaction videos to campaign milestones
- Artwork reveals w/ artists involved
In order to upload clips, you’ll need to have access within your Spotify For Artists account. If you need a refresher on how to claim access to your account, here’s our guide. Once you have that, artists should contact their distributor and submit for access that way. This quick video will get you familiar with the functionality of uploading a clip to an artist profile.
Some recent Clips highlights for us have been the palpable candour of Busted’s BTS clips, the ‘step into my studio’ vibe of edbl’s new release storytime, the harmonious colour animations to Flourish’ crisp electro-pop beats, & We The Commas’ series of beach-y clips to celebrate the release of their sonic ode to their track “San Diego”, to name a few.
Spotify seem poised to meet the upload-every-day-if-not-every-hour culture with more video content to support their audio content. In a world where influencers upload content consistently, music and its creators may not be able to meet those demands with songs, but perhaps they can with videos to match, and pave a simpler, more cohesive road to content consumption.
