The “Total Reach” metric, which provides artists and their teams with an overview of how their music is reaching consumers throughout YouTube, will now include data relating to YouTube Shorts, according to a recent announcement from YouTube. The Total Reach measure formerly only considered long-form videos shared by fans and the artist’s official content. According to YouTube, the newly revised indicator depicts the total number of listeners who are exposed to an artist’s music.

In a blog post, YouTube’s global head of music, Lyor Cohen, claimed that in January 2023, fan-made Shorts raised the average artist’s audience of unique viewers by more than 80%. Also, Shorts-active artists saw that, on average, more than 50% of their new channel subscribers came from their Shorts uploads.

Also, the firm is introducing a new “Songs” component in its Analytics tool to assist musicians and their teams in understanding how fans are viewing or interacting with their music across all video forms. Artists may now view their top songs from the previous 28 days and the songs most frequently used in short films in the new Songs section.

“Shorts are the appetizer to the entrée,” Cohen wrote. “They are the entry point, leading fans to discover the depth of an artist’s catalog, including music videos, interviews, live performances, lyric videos, and more. Look at Rema & Selena Gomez winning big by leveraging all the video formats available on YouTube. After they surpassed 60 million unique viewers of their official music videos and Shorts for Calm Down, fans uploaded Shorts featuring their track, taking viewership to another level: adding 350 million unique viewers in January, an increase of over 500%.”

Cohen used the example of the musician Oliver Tree, whose channel’s monthly viewers rose from six million to 75 million in less than four months after he uploaded 20 short videos and four long-form videos related to his song Miss You. Those who uploaded Shorts with the song in January received an additional 1.8 billion views.

The firm may be trying to get more musicians to use YouTube Shorts to promote their new music by adding YouTube Shorts data to the Total Reach measure, which would then result in more daily views of Shorts.