After a lot TikTok Competitors cropped about the U.S. Last summer, it looks like we added yet another name to that list. Enter YouTube Shorts, which is the company rolled out in beta on Thursdays for its American audience afterward testing the program in recent months in India.
During that first run abroad, Shorts looked and felt the same as TikTok: Users could record their clips over music, speed up or slow down segments, and string shorter clips together thanks to the “multi-segment camera” feature. With this wider rollout, YouTube is introducing a number of new preview-friendly features for creators they want to use. YOUsers are now free to use audio clips from other short films for their own content, and in the coming months they will also be able to use audio from YouTube’s endless clip archive. YouTube also promises that creators who don’t want their audio to be sampled can freely unsubscribe if they choose.
If it bottomless pit of YouTube content wasn’t enough, the company noted in its blog post announcing the rollout that it now has music licenses from hundreds of record labels and publishers, including Sony, Universal and Warner Music Group – and that library is growing. Chances are, if you can come up with a song, you probably can use it in Shorts
Obviously, YouTube is using the new product as an opportunity to promote its other services, including YouTube Music, which is still lagging behind pretty far behind the music streaming giant Spotify when it comes to popularity. If you’re watching a short movie and want to hear more of the song clip it used, according to YouTube, all you have to do is tap on the clip to see their official artist channelIf you watch a music video on YouTube and want to remix it for your own Short, YouTube says all you need to do is press a button below the video to remix it yourself, or watch other short films that use audio from that same clip.
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While Shorts are officially on U.S. Earth as of today, the YouTube blog notes that this will be a “gradual” rollout in the coming weeks. Of course, if that happens, YouTube intends to make it as visible as humanly possible: TThe company notes that it’s already lined up for Shorts on YouTube’s homepage, along with a new ‘viewing experience’ that allows users to swipe vertically from video to video, just like TikTok and literally any other TikTok competitor.
Speaking of all those competitors, you have to wonder how successful Shorts will eventually become. When Instagram’s TikTok clone, Reels, first rolled out to the masses, that was it pretty universally booed because it was not only a blatant knock-off, but a blatant knock-off that barely made the memorable appeal his inspiration did. Snapchat’s foray with its Spotlight, meanwhile, was called “tight-fisted and grotesqueBy some and one unmoderated mess by others. If YouTube is to do this right, it will need more than a huge music catalog to do it.