M3 StudiosSpring, TX5 min readAugust 2, 2026Spotify launched its first music video chart on July 21 and, for the first time, opened video pitching to artists. Both sit on top of a change made a month earlier, when Spotify began letting artists upload full-length videos themselves instead of routing everything through a label or distributor. Read together, these three moves turn Spotify into a place where a Houston artist can put a music video in front of the same people already streaming the song, and one detail inside the pitching rules changes when that video has to be finished.
The detail is the deadline. Only videos that are unreleased, or released within the past seven days, can be pitched. A visual made two months after a song comes out is not eligible for the playlists. The video is now part of the release, not the follow-up to it.
The Music Video Charts Global went live on July 21, ranking the top 50 videos worldwide by daily stream count. It sits inside Spotify's Charts and Music Video Playlists hubs, and the company says it will spotlight the top 10 across its social channels every Tuesday.
Pitching works the way song pitching already does. An artist submits the video's concept, mood, and visual style for consideration on playlists including Best New Videos, Live Performances, and Today's Top Videos. Videos delivered through a label or a distributor qualify, and so do videos uploaded directly through Spotify for Artists.
That direct upload path is the newer piece. On June 17, Spotify started letting artists in its beta upload live performances, studio sessions, covers, and official music videos themselves. The company says those uploads are royalty-bearing and may be chart-eligible, and that the beta now includes close to 100,000 artists. Before June, a video reached Spotify only through a label, a distributor, or DistroKid's video service. At the same time, Spotify stopped accepting new uploads of Clips, its short-form format, and said the Clips tab on artist profiles will become a Video tab.
Spotify published its own engagement data to explain why it is pushing this, and the figures are worth reading closely because they describe a mechanism rather than a vanity metric.
That listening lift isn't accidental. It's the result of Spotify building video into the core of how music gets delivered, pitched, discovered, and measured.
According to the company, a listener who watches a full-length video streams that song 64 percent more over the following three weeks than someone who only heard the audio. They are 1.4 times more likely to save it, share it, or add it to a playlist. They also go on to stream the rest of that artist's catalog 57 percent more across the same period. For the listeners Spotify classifies as super listeners, the artist lift is 62 percent, which the company says works out to more than an hour and forty minutes of additional listening on average.
Treat those as the platform's own numbers rather than independent findings, because they are. But the direction is the useful part: on Spotify's data, the video is not competing with the song for attention. It is deepening the relationship with the catalog behind it.
Most independent release plans treat the visual as phase two. Put the song out, see whether anything happens, and shoot a video if it does. That sequence made sense when video lived on a separate platform where a clip could be uploaded and found at any point in a song's life.
It does not work here. If a video can only be pitched while unreleased or within seven days of release, then the decision to make one has to happen while the record is still being made. The budget for the visual belongs in the same conversation as the budget for the mix. Waiting to see whether the song works means the pitching window closes before you ever consider it.
There is a second consequence that favors artists with a working relationship to a room. The eligible formats are broader than a full production. Live performances, studio sessions, and covers all qualify. A session that captures a real performance on camera while the record is being cut produces eligible material without a separate shoot day, which is the cheapest version of this that exists.
For a Houston artist the practical change is scheduling, not spending. If you are booking studio time this quarter, decide before you walk in whether anything gets filmed, because the difference between a session with a camera in the room and a session without one is a decision made in advance and almost no additional cost. That footage is eligible material, and it exists on the day the song is finished rather than two months later.
For a Houston video editor or director the read is competitive. A brand new surface with a brand new chart has almost nothing on it relative to a platform with two decades of catalog, and a weekly editorial slot has to be filled with something. That is the only period in any platform's life when placement is genuinely reachable. Our breakdown of how song credits became a discovery surface covers the same shift from a different angle, and the TikTok release console is the parallel tool on the other major platform.
If you need the visual side handled alongside the record, that is what our visual production work covers, and the session itself is booked here in Spring, TX.
Direct upload is still a beta and not every artist has access to it yet. Spotify describes uploads as royalty-bearing and possibly chart-eligible without publishing a video payout rate, so nobody should model income off this. YouTube still dominates music video by an enormous margin and none of this changes that this quarter. And the engagement figures above are Spotify's own, measured on Spotify, and should be read as a platform making its case.
Yes, within a beta that Spotify says includes close to 100,000 artists. Since June 17, 2026, those artists can upload live performances, studio sessions, covers, and official music videos through Spotify for Artists, and Spotify says the uploads are royalty-bearing and may be chart-eligible.
It is Spotify's first chart dedicated to music videos, launched July 21, 2026, ranking the top 50 videos worldwide by daily stream count. It appears in Spotify's Charts and Music Video Playlists hubs, and Spotify says it will highlight the top 10 on its social channels each Tuesday.
Through the same pitching flow used for songs, by submitting the video's concept, mood, and visual style. Videos can be considered for playlists including Best New Videos, Live Performances, and Today's Top Videos, whether they arrive via a label, a distributor, or a direct upload.
Only videos that are unreleased or released within the past seven days are eligible. That means the video needs to exist at or before the song's release rather than being made later.
Spotify describes artist video uploads as royalty-bearing but has not published a video payout rate, so the earnings side is not something artists can currently calculate.
Follow M3 Studios for the platform and payout mechanics Houston artists actually use: Instagram @metamusicmediainc, TikTok @metamusicmediainc, YouTube @metamusicmediainc. Questions: info@metamusicmedia.com. Record and film it in the same session, in Spring, TX: metamusicmedia.com/pages/book-your-session.
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