Billboard Magazine reports:
Yet another format is on the rise: “vertical video,” meaning videos sized to fit the dimensions of a phone rather than a monitor. Horizontal videos, it turns out, can’t just be cropped into vertical videos — or at least not with appealing results — so artists are still figuring out how best to make use of them.
Vertical videos can be featured more easily on sites like Instagram, and are particularly important on Spotify: They appear for some songs on Spotify’s most popular playlists, such as “Today’s Top Hits,” and have gotten enough results in listener engagement that labels and artists are looking at them more seriously.
“It’s a fairly nascent creative asset,” producer Zack Gershen says. “People have had lots of conversations about where the sweet spot of vertical video is: Horizontal videos are the more premium content, while the vertical tend to be more [about] narrative and lifestyle, but that’s rapidly changing.”