10 Yetis Insight – The Lowdown on Vine Music - It’s Mega!

TL;DR: Vine has really stepped up in the world of online video production with its latest updates. ‘Snap to Beat’ which allows users to create seamless, musical loops and ‘Featured Tracks’ which helps music discovery have really set it apart from its competitors.

These new updates promise greater engagement, promote more creative scope and allow Vine users to create videos that not only look good, but also sound great!

Today is a very special day; if you work in social media or online video production you’re about to lose your shit. Vine has introduced music, in multiple forms, marking the beginning of their ‘commitment to strengthen the connection’ between music and video.

The nitty gritty

Two new features have been added to the app – ‘Snap to Beat’ and ‘Featured Tracks’.

‘Snap to Beat’ is the first new feature to be added to Vine, allowing users to create perfect loops, where the music seamlessly loops as the video does (minus the glitches). Once you have chosen a song but tapping the ‘music note’ (in the Details screen), ‘Snap To Beat’ intuitively selects how much of the song to use and trims your video accordingly. This is something completely unique to Vine – maintaining its dominance over its competitor, Meerkat.

You can also edit the audio separately by simply turning off the ‘Snap to Beat’ option, offering users complete control over how much and which part of the track users want to include – great for adding sound effects!

‘Featured Tracks’ is probably the bigger of the upgrades of the two; some have said it could challenge the likes of Shazam, as it enables music discovery and exploration, while also allowing users to find out which tunes are playing in the background of a Vine.

Why it’s mega

Previously focusing on the visual components of Vine has suited the developers well, with more than 40 million users tapping into the power of the 6-second-snippets. But realising that there was more to be done to help users and brands achieve a greater level of engagement, developers knew it was important to add these new features to take online video production to the next level.

By allowing users to search and discover, as well introducing the ability to create with music on Vine, the app has improved its offering significantly. This means that the standard (sometimes boring) vines can now be finished off with a seamless musical loop – something which only seriously slick techs could achieve.

Vine has outright said that it’s more than just an app, with the impact of music ‘extending beyond our phones’. We’ve seen how The Whip found its way into the charts after being used in a Vine; massive statement I know, but hopefully it gets across just how powerful this app can be).

The ‘Featured Tracks’ section is great for up and coming artists, allowing them to share their music in a unique and engaging way, as well as allowing users to attach external links – and as it’s integrated with Twitter it’s easy to do too.

Brands, rejoice!

Vine has grown to become one of the best and most effective marketing tools for social media, particularly when it comes to Twitter. It can become really boring and mundane to constantly see a text-filled stream of news, so combining strong visuals – like these six-second clips – can help users stand out in an otherwise crowded, over saturated arena.

We’ve seen brands like Dunkin’ Donuts using the app to help keep its Super Bowl campaign momentum going, where they were the first to unveil a TV commercial made completely on Vine. By re-enacting memorable Super Bowl moments from past years, they reaped success by sharing something the audience would appreciate. It was timely, relevant and combined the brand and event together seamlessly.

Other brands, including Disney and Airbnb, have been capitalising on consumer interaction to help promote their brands. Disney’s ‘Show Your Disney Side’ competition invited fans to get creative using Vine by submitting a video that reflected their love for Disney. Let me tell you why this was so clever. This allowed them to promote Disney in a non-salesy way while gathering creative user-generated adverts to promote the company. Winning!

Use it or lose it

With more than 200 million people watching Vine videos each month, brands cannot afford to dismiss Vine as key channel to support marketing campaigns. With a large demographic of users, there is definitely a huge opportunity to tap into a diverse audience – so why not try and hit them all at once!

Vine is much more than just a lovely new toy for social. In a time where social platforms and apps were launching every few minutes, it’s easy to assume it’s just another novelty; a flash in the pan. But it actually provides brands with an innovative, powerful way to take advantage of the fact, which we all know; visual content performs better than text-based content on social media.

With such a huge glut of boring, commercial messages competing for social space, which you’re being pressured to push out by directors who often don’t understand how social works; a slick visual message that can be quickly scanned and digested is about as convenient as it gets for consumers.

It’s also another place to engage with your fans. It’s not just a broadcast channel; you can like, comment and revine so there’s lots of room for interaction, particularly at weekends.

From today, the new music discovery features are available on both iOS and Android, and the creation tools are available on iOS, so if time isn’t an issue and creativity is in abundance, then this is where you need to be at.