Have you seen my Short?

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