The story of video on Spotify and Apple Music is long, expensive and uneven. So why is Taylor Swift debuting her new video with them?

For more than a decade, Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music have been looking for excuses to host video on their services — music videos, concert videos, livestreams interviews, short films, breezy vertical video series, you name it.

Most of those plans have ended in quiet retreat. In recent years, video has been primarily an unobtrusive add-on (Spotify’s vertical Canvas videos, which loop for a few seconds), a podcast perk, or a thing that lives in another section of the corporate mothership (Apple Music’s channel on Apple TV; Amazon’s Prime Video concert livestreams). So it was a bit of a surprise to see that the biggest artist on the planet is debuting the music video to Life of a Showgirl’s “Opalite” exclusively on Spotify and Apple Music today, before it goes wide on Sunday. Is this some strange 2016 nostalgia thing?

There are many reasons for music streamers to do video: They all have basically the same music, so video is a way to set themselves apart. It’s a potential source of income if you’re selling ads like Spotify, and a way to keep people on the platform longer. (Not to be overlooked: Video is fun. If you work at a music streamer, it’s a nice break from, say, setting up the in-app push-notification marketing strategy for a contemporary Christian artist.)

But at the end of the day, changing people’s longtime habits — i.e. going to YouTube — is incredibly hard. It would require an enormous effort from the music streamers to become legit video platforms, one that could hurt their core businesses (audio) and would have no guarantee of success. So while Spotify and Apple have had music videos on their platforms for years, they have been a modest “value-add” that many subscribers don’t even know is there. (Amazon Music, where I worked for a time, launched music videos in 2020 and quietly phased them out in 2023.)

So why would Taylor Swift launch a video on the music streamers, when it would almost certainly get more views on YouTube? The feud between Lyor Cohen's YouTube and Billboard almost certainly has something to do with it. After a spat over how Billboard’s charts were weighting YouTube streams, YouTube stopped giving data to Billboard a few weeks ago. This means that any “Opalite” streams on YouTube won’t be counted towards the song’s chart position, unlike Spotify and Apple Music video streams, which very much will. This is no small consideration for Taylor Swift, who, as much or more than any other artist, really likes number one hits and charts records, and has a history of being strategic when it comes to her music’s chart position.

Will it work? Will other artists try similar high jinks? Will Zane Lowe become the next Matt Pinfield? Or will YouTube and Billboard squash the beef, so everybody can go back to their lanes? Watch this space.

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