Make Animated Artwork Videos with Rotor

There's an increasing need for a range of videos in a musician's repertoire — from full-blown music videos and short promos for socials, to simpler videos for album tracks to help them monetise more of their music on YouTube. It's common place for musicians to settle for the default unimaginative, static image videos YouTube provide for free — but we saw this an opportunity to help our customers give our users more control over their video's look and stand out from the crowd.

Animated artwork videos are audio-reactive videos that only require a track and an image, ideally album artwork, to create a compelling video in a matter of minutes. Our creative team designed a ton of unique styles that allow our users to stay on-brand and create polished videos.

We shipped Artwork Videos at the beginning of the year and it quickly gained popularity with our customer-base as these videos now account for around 30% of all videos bought by our users this year.

We monitored usage closely for a couple months and came to discover the conversion rate of this feature was very healthy — however, not enough of our users were being filtered into the artwork-video flow. Since discoverability was the issue, we found other ways to merchandise the feature, including showing the artwork-video styles within our main video creation flow.

As we watched more and more FullStory sessions of people using this feature, we found some more pain points. Our users wanted to get a feel for each style, but didn't like waiting around for their video to be rendered in each one. I collaborated with one of developers to create a little preview window triggered by a 2 second hover that would allow users to view a trailer for each video style without kicking off a render. After shipping it and monitoring it on FullStory we found that it had solved this pain point for our users.

Create your own animated artwork video and let me know what you think!