Spotify to Roll Out Music Videos for U.S. and Canada Customers

Spotify is rolling out music videos to its users in the U.S. and Canada, the company confirmed with Billboard. The feature was previously beta-tested in nearly 100 overseas markets last year.

A Spotify representative says music videos will be integrated into the service in the coming weeks for U.S. and Canadian customers, though it did not clarify whether they would be available to all users or just premium subscribers (though the latter was the case for the beta rollout).

The news arrived one day after Spotify and the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) announced they had struck a licensing deal for “expanded audiovisual rights” in the U.S., in a bid to increase the royalty-earning potential of publishers and songwriters who opt in. The agreement came amid a longstanding battle between Spotify and the NMPA over the streamer’s bundling of audiobooks into its premium subscription plans, which Spotify claims qualifies it to pay a discounted royalty rate for U.S. mechanical royalties on its premium tiers. According to sources close to the NMPA deal who previously spoke with Billboard, the organization doesn’t plan to back down from the bundling issue in the wake of the audiovisual rights agreement, as that deal doesn’t address mechanical royalties.

Notably, the news of the NMPA deal followed announcements from NMPA members — including Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell Music, Kobalt and their parent companies — that they had struck direct licensing deals with Spotify over the last year. Though details were slight, each of those agreements was said to increase payments to songwriters, including through audiovisual streaming.

Spotify began rolling out music videos for subscribers in dozens of markets last year, in an apparent bid to compete with platforms like TikTok and YouTube. In October 2024, it released findings that “listeners who discover a track with a music video on Spotify are 34% more likely to stream it again the following week,” and that “on average, tracks with videos are 24% more likely to be saved or shared.”