Spotify made two moves on Tuesday (July 21) that together signal the platform is no longer treating video as a supplementary feature. The company launched Music Video Charts Global, its first chart dedicated entirely to music videos, ranking the top 50 videos worldwide by daily stream count and updating weekly. Simultaneously, Spotify opened video pitching directly to artists for the first time, allowing creators to submit music videos to its editorial team for playlist consideration through the same Spotify for Artists dashboard used for song pitching. Both features are part of a video expansion that now includes nearly 100,000 artists in a beta allowing direct full-length video uploads, a capability Spotify opened to artists in June after years of routing all video through labels and distributors exclusively.
The chart sits within Spotify’s Charts and Music Video Playlists hubs, with the top 10 videos spotlighted across Spotify’s social channels every Tuesday. The pitching tool mirrors the existing song pitch workflow: artists submit a video’s concept, mood, and visual style for consideration across playlists including Best New Videos, Live Performances, and Today’s Top Videos. Only unreleased videos or those released within the past seven days are eligible, whether delivered through a label or distributor or uploaded directly via Spotify for Artists. Artists can pitch multiple eligible videos simultaneously, a flexibility the song pitching tool does not offer, reflecting the different release cadences of visual versus audio content.
The engagement data Spotify has been building its video case around since the December 2025 US and Canada launch was cited again in Tuesday’s announcement. After watching a full-length video, listeners stream that song 64% more over the following three weeks than those who only heard the audio, are 1.4 times more likely to save, share, or add it to a playlist, and go on to stream the rest of the artist’s catalog 57% more over the same period. For Spotify’s “super listeners,” the most engaged tier, video watching drives a 62% stream increase equating to more than an hour and 40 minutes of additional listening. “That listening lift isn’t accidental,” the company said. “It’s the result of Spotify building video into the core of how music gets delivered, pitched, discovered, and measured.” Those numbers represent a compelling conversion funnel argument: video is not competing with audio streaming, it is driving more of it.
The timing of the chart and pitching expansion connects directly to Spotify’s Q1 2026 earnings call, where Co-CEO Gustav Söderström compared the current video and AI opportunity to the launch of the iPhone and App Store in 2009. On that call, Co-CEO Alex Norström noted that since the global rollout of Spotify’s more personalized free experience, users in key markets including the US are “listening and watching more days per month.” The video chart and editorial pitching are the content infrastructure layer that makes those behavioral changes commercially useful: a chart creates incentive for artists to prioritize Spotify video distribution, and pitching creates a direct editorial relationship between the platform and creators that YouTube has cultivated for years through YouTube Studio and the YouTube Creator Insider program.
The YouTube comparison is the unavoidable context for everything Spotify is doing in video. YouTube has dominated music video streaming globally for nearly two
