YouTube meets a new era with DreamTrack and music video remixing

YouTube revolutionised the music video space: first by enabling global, on-demand music video consumption, and second by empowering consumers to share their own videos with the world. Nearly two decades later, the latter innovation has arguably proven more impactful than the former. Music videos are losing cultural value to music in videos posted by users. A new generation is no longer content to simply watch a polished narrative delivered by their favourite artist — they are eager to make their own version, with short-form video emerging as the preferred format.

YouTube is meeting these shifts with two new experiments on its short-form video platform, YouTube Shorts: the generative music tool DreamTrack and a music video “remixing” feature.

In November 2023, Shorts began trailing DreamTrack, a tool powered by Google’s generative artificial intelligence music model Lyria. Users simply type in a topic and choose an artist from a selection that includes Charli XCX and John Legend to generate a 30-second song clip in the voice and musical style of their chosen artist. In February, 2024, Shorts announced new tools for music video remixing, including side-by-side videos — tailored for choreography, using a moment from the music video as a green screen, and cutting and pasting a five-second clip from the music video into one’s own. As a press release explains: “It’s not enough to just watch the video — you want to join in on the building hype around the songs and be part of these music movements.”

The features are still just experiments, and there is not yet an agreed-upon copyright framework capable of scaling something like DreamTrack beyond a small selection of partner artists. However, these experiments reflect a larger, radical consumer behaviour shift that the music industry will have to figure out how to adapt to. While DreamTrack is contained to Shorts, music video remixing also helps create needed synergy between short-form video and official music videos — presenting the two as complementary rather than competitive.

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