 Over the past few years you've probably seen many of your favorite artists have these neat little videos when you play their songs on Spotify. And if you're a particularly ambitious musician you've probably wondered, what the fuck? Why can't I do that? And found out this is only reserved for musicians who are on the big labels and distributors and not for those of you who upload music through DistroKids, Symphonic, TuneCourse, CD Baby, Amuse or any of the other public music aggregators. But that has now changed and Spotify is letting anyone and with a Spotify for RS page make these video loops they call Canvas for their songs. So in this video I'm going to tell you how to take advantage of this and get your music on Spotify Canvas. Hi, I'm Jesse Cannon, a music marketing nerd who's teaching musicians how to grow their fanbase from 0 to 10,000 fans. And this is Muse Formation. So let's first go over why in the hell you would do this. When people are discovering your music, whether it's from a playlist or getting a link sent from a friend, the Canvas allows them to get a hint at what else you have going on image-wise. Whether it's a charismatic moment from a video to some creative imagery you may have made specifically for it, you give the chance to create curiosity about your music videos and a fan building the relationship with you by showing you have more to your offer visually. I know this is subtle, but we have to remember these are often your first or early impressions with a new fan and everything you do to potentially tip that new fan to explore what you do and become addicted to your music is worth it. Especially considering that it takes so little time to repurpose content you've already made into the format of Canvas. If you don't believe me though, don't take my word for it. Here's Spotify's own data. When songs have a Canvas listeners are 145% more likely to share the track, 5% more likely to keep streaming, 20% more likely to add the song to their personal playlist, and 9% more likely to visit an artist profile page. Like I always tell you, it's all about accumulating subtleties, and this is a subtle thing that helps create curiosity to get to know you better and get more streams, build relationships with fans, so you keep growing your fan base on Spotify. But I may have gotten ahead of myself. Some of you don't even realize what happens in a Canvas, and as you can see here, it's often images from a video, a photo shoot, sometimes an outtake from a music video, and yes, and even sometimes you could fall in love with a wide panoramic shot, you will want to cry when it's in that weird 916 aspect ratio just like Instagram stories. But as you can see here, it does just right, and you can translate it down to that narrow crop just fine and still have it be beautiful. Now some of you with big catalogs may be wondering, what the fuck? You are saying you want me to upload a video for every song? These are really short videos. These are three to eight second loops of videos, shorter than any TikTok or for those of you old enough to remember half a decade ago, a Vine. As well, they can also be a JPEG still image. So if you have a funny picture or something that adds depth to the song, or even a Polaroid from a photo shoot, or even an outtake photo that fans will appreciate, one thing to keep in mind is Spotify is strongly against you putting a link or a call to action these. So watch out for that. They advise to get singing or rapping since I guess it won't link up with the song. But if that's the most charismatic moment you got, I don't think it's a crime. They also tell you not to put the song or artist name in the actual video loop, since that will already be in the visual frame as the listener listens to the song and there's no need to reiterate. They do advise, and I quote. Trimmed down music videos and incomplete stories can leave fans expecting more. I think that's right, since these can really be a clue to a fan to go see more, and they are smart enough to go to YouTube to look for more, which can help you drive YouTube subscriptions and streams. Let's also remember, if you do something special with the canvas, it gives you another way to draw fans to go drive up your streaming numbers. And for those of you I was just mentioning with deep catalogs, you can drive up relationships with your old tracks by doing an album every week and then telling fans to go watch and see all the fun canvases you have posted. For those of you with a shallow catalog, if you do something fun with it, this can be a great post for a week after your song has been released to try to drive fans to it and in an eventful way to remind them you have a new song out. But let's remember, when you make this special, an Easter egg or exclusive content, it has more chance to pull fans to stream your song on Spotify and get them to go deeper with your music when you link it from social media. But you're wondering, how in the hell do you do this? Let's open up DaVinci Resolve, which if you're not familiar is a free video editing software that many people say is better than expensive programs like Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro. I make every video on it and tons of content with it and literally a year ago, I had never even used it and yet I feel like a pro now since it's so easy to use and no, they didn't give me the same. So let's show you how you would make one of these from a pre-existing video that is not in the canvas format. Okay, so I have a blank DaVinci Resolve screen open here. I've already made two videos. One I'm going to do from the Billie Eilish song that we were listening to before and the other is from my friends Somos. So the first thing we need to do is we need to get resolve into the right aspect ratio, which is that Instagram story aspect ratio. If you don't know what an aspect ratio is, is it's the shape the video is in just as video is in a totally different shape when you hold your camera one way versus the other. So in order to get it into nine by 16, we have to select it properly. So all we're going to do is we're just going to switch these two since it's just reversing the way the phone is normally orientated if you think of it that way. So 1080, 1920, and we hit save and look at that. So now, so you might be saying this is not how Billie Eilish looked when you saw her in that canvas before. And as you can see, it's just made this taller. So if we select this, this is your inspector. So what we can do with that inspector is all sorts of things to adapt the footage. So one, we can start zooming it in. So that way, we never know, have a lot more of her. And she's in the crop. Look at that. That looks pretty damn good to me. And the position feels pretty good going top to bottom. So now if I do this, oh, yeah, there we go. And you know, if I wanted to, I could maybe get into some effects and have some fun on the top and the bottom. But you know, let's remember they don't want you to put type of the song title and they don't want you to put your artist name on there. So just want to be like a blanking fill or something, which you can do like this. Oh yeah, there we go. That looks pretty cool. And that's pretty easy and fun. So for this video, it's the same thing. Now this one's a little trickier because a lot of the stuff's not quite on frame. Like as you can see, not everybody's in the center all the time. So let's play around with this for a second. Yeah, that's still working. See, even when these videos are wide, they still feel good when you do this. Isn't that nice? So I cut these videos down to eight seconds. I found the funnest part. It's really just that simple. After that, we have to get in the right format though. So we're going to go to custom, we're going to title it canvas for new song, we're going to choose the location. And the important thing you have to do here is you have to make it an MP4 and then add it to your render queue and hit start render and then it'll save as the proper file. Now that we have that video, let me show you how to upload it to Spotify by using the Spotify for artist portal. It's not as obvious as you would think. So now I'm in my Spotify for artist page. I want to click music. And then this is where it could be confusing is like, you know, this upcoming is where you're normally going to submit your playlist pitches. But here, you're going to click on the song. And then there's this add canvas button. And then you simply drag and drop that new song there. And then you will be able to preview it and watch. So yes, canvas are not as sexy as playlist promotion or many of the other things I discuss on promoting your music on Spotify. But if you're interested in that, let me suggest that you click on the videos that's about to come up on this end screen or the description below since there's no one else on YouTube who's telling you how to actually promote your music on Spotify. And whether that's playlist promotion or building up your community, I'm the channel telling you how to do it. So watch another video and learn to up your fan base on Spotify. Thanks for watching.