YouTube Shorts Doubled Some Artists’ Total Reach On The Platform In January

YouTube’s Shorts are helping music artists stay in the long game.

New data released by the Google
GOOG
-owned platform shows that in January, artists who posted weekly on average in the short-form video section saw more than 50 percent of their new channel subscribers coming directly from their Shorts posts on average.

In January fan-created Shorts also increased the average artist’s audience of Unique Viewers by more than 80 percent. And during that month, the top 1,000 songs on Shorts saw more than 280 billion combined views.

The latest stats—shared today in a public letter from Lyor Cohen, global head of Music for YouTube and Google—support the video-sharing website’s promotion of Shorts as a key driver to augment not only artist discovery but deeper fandom in what’s become a deafeningly noisy marketplace.

“While Shorts’ growth has been a wow—generating 50 billion daily views as of December 2022—I will continue saying again and again that Shorts are the appetizer to the entrée,” said Cohen. “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.”

Among recent Shorts successes, after Rema & Selena Gomez surpassed 60 million unique viewers of their official music videos and Shorts for “Calm Down,” fans uploaded Shorts featuring their track and added 350 million unique viewers in January, an increase of more than 500 percent.

Singer/songwriter/producer Oliver Tree uploaded 20 Shorts and four long-form videos tied to his song “Miss You.” His channel’s monthly viewers increased from 6 million to 75 million in just over four months, and then his fans brought in another 1.8 billion views in January by uploading Shorts featuring this track, according to Cohen.

“YouTube Shorts has been an incredible tool for our artists’ channel growth. According to YouTube analytics, we see some of our artists gain hundreds of thousands of subscribers from the Shorts feed alone,” said Cory Goldberg, associate director, content marketing, at Epic Records. “Shorts has been especially helpful in keeping artists’ subscribers engaged and active, especially in the weeks following official PMV releases.”

Brian Dackowski, EVP, viral marketing & analytics at Atlantic Records, said: “As we continue to leverage short-form video platforms to drive our records and to listen and react to our artists’ fanbases, YouTube Shorts has become a key part of our digital strategy this year.”

Among new features for artists, as of March YouTube’s “Analytics for Artists” Total Reach metrics now include fan-uploaded Shorts in addition to official content uploaded by the artist and long-form videos uploaded by fans. YouTube also created a Songs section in its Analytics metrics to help artists see the ways fans are listening to their music or creating with it, across all video formats.