Spotify Launches a Global Music Video Chart and Opens Direct Artist Pitching

Spotify has introduced a global chart dedicated to music videos. The ranking lists the world's top 50 videos by daily play count, marking the point at which the company begins measuring video as a first-class format. Alongside it, artists can now pitch their own videos directly to the editorial team.

Direct upload continues to expand in beta, allowing official music videos as well as covers, studio sessions, and live footage to be placed on the platform itself. A series of updates that began in June has now been bound together by a visible ranking layer.

Read against the wider industry, this is an audio-first platform pulling video watch time onto its own surface. Video lengthens sessions and feeds both advertising inventory and recommendation accuracy, so whether audio and video can sit inside a single recommendation system is becoming a medium-term competitive question.

For production teams, the practical effect is a change in how video assets are planned. Because secondary material such as studio and live footage now has a distribution surface of its own, designing a shoot around multiple destinations becomes a realistic option. In many cases, re-editing existing footage to fill those surfaces will deliver better value than commissioning another standalone video.

The pitching route deserves equal attention. More editorial submission capacity means more entry points for smaller teams, though the structure mirrors audio playlist pitching: the quality of the submission decides the outcome, and that depends on having release plans and asset metadata in order before applying.

ZEN editorial view: the assumption that video is promotional collateral is giving way to video as a distributed work. Deciding at the planning stage which surface each piece of footage is destined for looks likely to become standard practice.

Sources: Music Business Worldwide, Digital Music News, Playlist Push