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Spotify is officially expanding its offerings beyond just audio with Introduction to music videos. The streamer is rolling out a beta program that offers premium subscribers access to music videos on mobile, desktop and TV for a select number of tracks from artists like Ed Sheeran and Ice Spice.
In an email he saw TechCrunch“We started with a limited subset of the full catalog, which includes thousands of music videos,” said Sten Jarmark, Spotify’s vice president and global head of consumer experience. “Within this subset, we aimed to prioritize a broad range of genres and artists across our launch markets.” ” Both YouTube (of course) and Apple Music already offer music videos, so this new feature helps Spotify keep up with some of its biggest competitors.
To watch a music video, Spotify users listening to a song can tap Switch to Video directly on the Now Playing screen. The music video will always replay the song from the beginning, but users can touch switch back to audio at any time. Even if the music video plays, Spotify will still queue up the next song as audio only.
The pilot is currently only available in 11 countries, and was chosen based on “a number of criteria including market size and availability of local content support,” Jarmark said. While the United States was not on the list, the countries included represent a quite global audience: Brazil, Colombia, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Netherlands, Poland, Philippines, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Users from these countries must also have a premium account to watch music videos.
Rumors that Spotify might add music videos started last July after a number of layoffs (and more have happened since then). This announcement is the first time Spotify has announced the presence of music videos on its platform. However, A Reddit user They posted three months ago that they had the option to “switch to video” in one song: My wayby Limp Bizkit.
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