YouTube Shorts Expands to Canada, Allows Users to Tap Into YouTube Music Catalogue

YouTube Shorts is coming to Canada.

Shorts, YouTube’s TikTok rival for building 60-second videos set to music that launched first in India and then expanded to the US, is now opening up in three more regions — Canada, the UK, and Latin America.

“Last year, we announced that we are building YouTube Shorts, a short-form video experience for anyone who wants to create short, catchy videos using nothing but their mobile phones,” reads a blog post from the company. “Since introducing our initial beta in India and the US, we’ve already seen many creative, awesome Shorts from our community. People are also watching more and more Shorts around the globe – the YouTube Shorts player has surpassed 6.5 billion daily views globally.”

Alongside that, YouTube is turning on a new feature: users will now be able to dip into the wider YouTube catalogue when creating their videos.

Back in March, YouTube first teased the ability to repurpose sounds from existing videos for Shorts — a key component of TikTok that enables viral bandwagoning to thrive. That said, on YouTube, this ability will first roll globally before arriving in the US in coming weeks.

Currently, creators can sample audio from other Shorts videos, and pull songs from YouTube’s licensed music library.

Going forward, however, users will be able to tap a new “Create” button in the YouTube app — below videos and beside the “like” and “dislike” buttons — in order to sample an audio cut from the above video for their Shorts. At the same time, Shorts viewers can tap on the audio track in order to go back to the YouTube video from which it was derived — thus providing an incentive for creators as a potential traffic driver.

If creators do not wish for their videos to be repurposed for Shorts — if their content contains sensitive moments, for instance — they must opt out manually for every video in upload settings. That said, amid some pushback from creators, YouTube says it’s currently working on a bulk opt-out option.

“There is some concern about examples of videos that you might think are personal or sensitive and that’s why creators have asked for the ability to opt out,” Todd Sherman, the product lead for YouTube Shorts, explains. “But creators also seem to recognize that [Shorts] sort of doesn’t work if it’s very selectively an opt-in.”

The geographic and feature expansions underscore how Google continues to double down on the shorter video format to capture some of the audience that might otherwise go to competitors like TikTok.