What a Motion Cover Is and Why It Works

Music is made from the heart, and every artist also wants it to become a business. Every business advertises, and advertising is not only targeting and billboards — companies spend heavily on producing the images and videos themselves, because the job of an advertising video is to make the viewer interested in the product.

The two-second rule

Because music is promoted on social platforms, this is the window you get. If you have not interested the viewer within about two seconds, you have lost the listener — and if you paid to put that post in front of them, you have lost the budget too. Not because the music was wrong, but because the post was not convincing.

What a motion cover is for

A motion cover is a tool for pulling in new viewers and turning them into listeners. That is its entire purpose, and it is designed around the window above rather than around looking impressive.

Why movement works on these platforms

On visual platforms people look at images and video first, and a great many of them are watching with the sound off. A motion cover's job is to hold the viewer inside the post for those first seconds. Once attention is caught and the post has held them, they notice the song itself — and if they like what they hear, they go looking for the full version on your profile.

An honest caveat

We ran a survey on whether motion covers directly increase plays and the results were genuinely split. The reasoning above is how we think it works, and it matches what we see, but we would rather present it as our position than as a measured fact.