Everybody knows that our mission at YouTube is to become the
No. 1 contributor of revenue for the music industry by 2025.
But what you might not know is how important fandom is to us.
We want YouTube to be
the place
for artists
to create sticky relationships with their fans and develop
long-term careers.
In the era of abundance of choice, YouTube Shorts helps fans
crowdsource their life’s soundtrack. We need to make sure that
once they find this soundtrack, they’re aided with prompts to
dive deeper into music videos, interviews, livestreams, and
more. It’s critical for discovery on Shorts to lead to the
consumption of long-form content, and thus more immersive
fandom.
It’s officially been a year since we launched, and momentum is
growing. We have a lot of work to do, but here’s an update:
-
Shorts are exploding on YouTube:
Shorts
are generating 30 billion views per day, up 400% from 1
year ago, with
1.5 billion monthly logged-in users consuming Shorts
.
-
Shorts are developing careers:
Official
artist channels uploading both Shorts and long-form video
are seeing better overall watch time and subscriber growth
relative to those only uploading long-form.
-
Shorts are redefining the reach of music on
YouTube:
In April 2022, Shorts containing content sampled from
long-form videos generated over 100 billion views. Music
on YouTube reaches users through official music videos,
our music streaming app, user generated content,
livestreams, live performances, lyric videos, community
posts, and more. But now, we have all of those plus
Shorts.
Artists like
JVKE, Madilyn Bailey, Cooper Alan,
and
EMELINE
have grown their subscriber base by
1.4 million, 480K, 290K, and 150K respectively, all directly
from Shorts. To read more about what artists & the
industry are saying about Shorts, check out the
YouTube Blog
.
And if we’re talking fandom, we need to mention
BTS
, who just landed their sixth #1 album
Proof. BTS has been with us on Shorts since day 1. When we
launched the product globally last summer, we worked together
on the
Permission to Dance Challenge
. Fast forward to this summer, we’re back at it with the
#MyBTStory
campaign.
We know the path to artist success has never been more
demanding. Artists have different approaches for how they
create music, and the always-on, multiplatform strategy isn’t
for everyone. That’s why we want to work
together
to build a platform that helps
all
artists reach new fans with different
content formats.
The vision is there, and it’s always a work in progress, but
the future is bright. We won’t stop until music discovery on
YouTube leads to ticket sales, merch sales, and true fandom.
To close out, I want to share
my latest creation
with you. If I can have fun with Shorts, you can too!
With love and respect,
The Short List?