YouTube’s new metric, called the “Music Video Reach,” is designed to provide a comprehensive measure of an artist’s popularity across all formats on the platform, including music videos, official audio, and Shorts. This metric will help artists and their teams to better understand their fans’ engagement with their music and video content.
Music Video Reach takes into account views and engagement metrics from a variety of sources, including official music videos, lyric videos, live performances, remixes, and other related content. It also factors in data from YouTube Shorts, the platform’s short-form video format that is becoming increasingly popular among users.
By providing a more holistic view of an artist’s performance on YouTube, Music Video Reach can help artists and their teams make informed decisions about their content strategy, promotional efforts, and partnerships. It can also serve as a valuable tool for record labels, managers, and other industry professionals who are looking to identify rising talent and trends on the platform.
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In addition, the company is introducing a new “Songs” section in its Analytics tool to assist artists and their teams in understanding how fans are listening to or creating their music across all video formats. Artists will be able to see their top songs from the previous 28 days, as well as which songs are being used the most in Shorts, in the new Songs section.
“Shorts are the appetizer to the entrée,” Cohen wrote. “They are the entry point, leading fans to discover the depth of an artist’s catalog, including music videos, interviews, live performances, lyric videos, and more. Look at Rema & Selena Gomez winning big by leveraging all the video formats available on YouTube. After they surpassed 60 million unique viewers of their official music videos and Shorts for Calm Down, fans uploaded Shorts featuring their track, taking viewership to another level: adding 350 million unique viewers in January, an increase of over 500%.”
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In another case, Cohen mentioned that after artist Oliver Tree uploaded 20 short videos and four long-form videos related to his song Miss You, his channel’s monthly viewers increased from six million to 75 million in less than four months. In January, users generated an additional 1.8 billion views by uploading Shorts featuring the song.
By incorporating YouTube Shorts data into the Total Reach metric, the company may be hoping to encourage more artists to use Shorts to promote new music, resulting in more daily views of Shorts.
Google announced last month that YouTube Shorts are now being watched by more than 1.5 billion logged-in users each month, with over 50 billion daily views. Although this is a significant achievement, it is worth noting that the number of views on Shorts lags behind those on Instagram and Facebook. Meta reported in October that Reels received 140 billion daily views across both social networks.
YouTube has been looking for ways to increase Shorts viewership. For example, Shorts debuted on television in November of last year. The move was seen as a way for YouTube to better compete with TikTok, which had also launched its own TV app across multiple platforms last year.
