Spotify Stopped Taking Clips. It Wants the Whole Video Now.

Picture an artist with a single due in six weeks. The video plan is the usual one: a handful of vertical teasers, thirty seconds each, cut for the phone. One of them was meant for Spotify.

That slot is gone. On June 17, 2026, Spotify stopped accepting new Clips, the short vertical videos an artist could attach to a track or a profile. The same day it opened a beta for something much bigger: full-length video, uploaded straight through Spotify for Artists.

Four months later, a lot of release plans still have the old slot written in.

What changed

This is what Spotify announced on its Spotify for Artists blog on June 17, 2026.

Artists in the beta can upload full-length videos tied to a specific song or release. Four kinds are accepted: official music videos, live performances, acoustic or studio sessions, and covers. Landscape, 16:9, is the recommended format.

Visualizers, lyric videos, multi-song concerts and videos without music are not supported for now.

The videos are royalty-bearing and may be chart-eligible. They appear in a new Video tab on the artist profile, on release pages, in the Now Playing view and in video playlists.

Clips uploaded before the cutoff stay live and move into that Video tab. Inside Countdown Pages the short format survives under a new name, countdown videos, so a pre-release teaser still has a home.

Access is rolling out gradually, with a waitlist for anyone who doesn’t have it yet. In a follow-up post on July 21, Spotify said nearly 100,000 artists were in the beta. It also said delivery through labels and distributors remains the primary path, so a distributor that delivers video is still a valid route.

What Spotify says video does

The numbers come from the same two posts. According to Spotify, listeners who stream a video go on to stream that song 64% more often over the following three weeks, and the rest of the artist’s catalog 57% more.

Those are averages, reported by the platform that wants more video uploaded, with no sample size and no method attached. Treat them as a direction.

The direction is clear enough, though. The place where people already listen to the song now has room for the full performance, and it treats that performance as part of the release.

What it changes in a release plan

For years the practical advice was to think short and vertical. That still holds for social. What moved is the long, horizontal piece: it has a second home besides YouTube, sitting right next to the song.

A live session used to be a nice extra. Now it has a slot on the release page.

What an artist can do with that:

• Open Spotify for Artists and look for the video upload option. If it isn’t there, join the waitlist today.
• Ask your distributor whether they deliver video to Spotify.
• When you plan the shoot, protect one full take of the song in 16:9. A live or studio performance qualifies, and it is usually the cheapest of the four formats to make well.
• Tie every video to one song. A full concert file doesn’t qualify. One song from that concert does.
• Have it ready before release day. Spotify recommends delivering on or before the release, and its video pitching to editors, also in beta, only takes videos that are unreleased or out for seven days or less.

None of this retires the vertical cuts. One good session feeds both: the full take for Spotify and YouTube, the short pieces cut from the same footage.

One caution. Beta features change. Accepted formats, eligibility and placements may look different by the time access reaches you, so read the current rules on Spotify’s side before building a whole plan around them.

If a release is coming up and the full take of the song isn’t on the plan yet, that’s the part we help put together.

Sources: Spotify for Artists, “Now in Beta: Upload Full-Length Videos Directly to Spotify” (June 17, 2026) and “How Video on Spotify Takes Your Fans Further” (July 21, 2026); Spotify Support, “Clips”.