YouTube Shorts – Everything You Need to Know

Shorts is the YouTube equivalent of TikTok — a platform that lets creators upload short, shareable videos for the world to see.

YouTube rolled out the beta version of Shorts in India, back in 2020. The platform quickly gained momentum with fans: the number of Shorts creators in India has tripled since December 2020 alone. Now that Shorts is live in the US, the platform looks set to shake up the world of social media.

Shorts is a way for people to connect with a new audience using their smartphone and the Shorts camera via the YouTube app. Videos can be up to 60 seconds long. Users can then choose to spice up their clips by accelerating or slowing down their recordings, add captions, or add sound. YouTube has claimed that Shorts will allow creators to use audio from videos across its platform, which YouTube says “includes billions of videos worldwide”.

Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Publishing, Warner Music Group and Warner Chappell Music, Believe, Merlin, 300 Entertainment, and Kobalt are just some of the label and publishing partners already involved.

As an independent artist, why does this matter to me? It’s just a video platform, right? Wrong. Users can also add music to their videos from millions of songs in the Shorts library, including any song distributed to YouTube Music through iMusician.

This is huge. With 2 billion viewers visiting YouTube every month, this is an opportunity not to be missed. The advantages of making your music available on Shorts are endless: you will expand the reach of your music, grow your fanbase, access the huge Shorts audience, and more. As Shorts continues to develop, the option to monetize Shorts clips may also come in the future.

Social media is changing the rules of how the music industry works. Short-form video platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts are catapulting artists into the charts, thanks to viral videos. If your music gets featured in one of these breakthrough videos, it could change your career, forever.

Music is a key element in sharable short videos. Remember “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X? That track blew up all thanks to TikTok. That song went on to become the longest-running No. 1 on the Hot 100 — earning Lil Nas X two Grammy Awards along the way.

These social platforms also operate differently from popular streaming sites: a song’s popularity isn’t based on how many times it has been streamed, but rather how many people have used it in their videos. Great news for smaller, independent artists looking for exposure. Platforms like Shorts offer a global stage for DIY musicians to be discovered. With the right song, at the right time, anything could happen.

If you currently distribute your music to YouTube via iMusician, your music is already available on YouTube Shorts. If you’re not distributing to YouTube yet – what are you waiting for? iMusician can distribute your music to YouTube easily, just choose the pricing plan that suits you.

If you started your release with iMusician on our Free Plan and did not select YouTube, you can simply - at any time - upgrade your release to one of our subscriptions, AMPLIFY or AMPLIFY+ to distribute your music to YouTube. You will only pay the difference in package prices.

If you still haven’t started your first release, now is the time. Not only can you tap into Shorts’ audience, but you can release your music to over 200 music stores around the world.