The Weeknd Concert Film Arrives Exclusively on Spotify — But Growing Pains Persist Amid the Platform’s Aggressive Video Expansion

The Weeknd performing during Spotify’s first ‘Billions Club’ concert. Photo Credit: Spotify

Want to watch The Weeknd’s new concert film? At least for the next 48 hours, you can only do so via Spotify, which has exclusively added the special amid an aggressive video buildout.

The diversification-minded streaming service this morning premiered the 45-minute special, billed as the latest installment in Billions Club: The Series. As its title suggests, the latter is an “original video series celebrating artists as they reach the milestone of 1 billion streams on a single track.”

Of course, The Weeknd isn’t alone in achieving billion-stream tracks in today’s volume-heavy listening landscape. Additionally, the Toronto native isn’t the first to put out a Billions Club episode; Ed Sheeran and Miley Cyrus released the first two installments (also captured in video) last year.

However, the pre-recorded Cyrus and Sheeran episodes run about six minutes apiece, with The Weeknd’s nearly hour-long viewing option, produced by OBB Pictures, therefore representing a major strategic shift.

As part of that shift, Spotify, eyeing a growing number of IRL events, staged the appropriate Weeknd concert in Los Angeles as well.

The artist then contributed voiceover elements to the final film product, which will be available solely on Spotify for the next two days.

Though the 48-hour exclusivity window isn’t too aggressive, it’ll enable Spotify to reach the 34-year-old’s superfans and possibly some casual listeners. At the time of writing, upon searching for The Weeknd on Spotify, the special was rather conspicuously featured as the top result.

It remains to be seen exactly how many plays the work racks up for The Weeknd, who has a staggering 117 million Spotify monthly listeners to his credit. And among many other things, 2025 could spur conversations about precisely what constitutes a podcast.

Competition is fierce in that increasingly video-centered space, and YouTube managed to dethrone Spotify as the leading stateside podcast-consumption destination in 2024. But the Stockholm-based service is still grouping content like The Weeknd’s concert special into the podcast category – and raising audience-metric questions in the process.

Adjacent questions persist as well for Spotify, which officially rolled out its video-podcast-focused Partner Program earlier in January.

By now, many are aware of the ample non-music audio (referring to white noise and a whole lot else) and the multitude of generic recordings (some made with AI, some made by proper musicians) on Spotify. Monetized or not, those not-so-artistic uploads are inherently detrimental to actual music professionals in search of listeners.

Furthermore, the podcasting side of Spotify is hardly free of low-quality videos – an important point given many users’ undiscerning viewership habits and the fact that Spotify is cutting creators in on Premium revenue under its Partner Program.

In late December, reports pointed to the presence of adult videos on Spotify, which moved to hire a number of content-moderation employees last year.

Once again at the time of writing, it wasn’t difficult to find similar media. Keeping things PG-13, a page called “Geil” has apparently uploaded as video podcasts compilations (one titled “Nice and hot”) of scantily clad women dancing on TikTok.

The women themselves look to have uploaded the media to TikTok originally, and the videos aren’t overtly explicit. But said videos definitely aren’t podcasts, have presumably arrived on Spotify without the relevant creators’ knowledge, and are riddled with protected music.

In other words, Spotify’s video extravaganza is seemingly prioritizing rapid growth above other considerations. Last year, a little-covered Cineverse tie-up brought full Dog Whisperer episodes and much more to the platform.

Complete episodes of Fox’s Bob’s Burgers and different shows (still categorized as podcasts) also made their way onto the service at some point, a cursory search indicates.

Link to the source article – https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/01/07/the-weeknd-spotify-concert-film/

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