# How to Use YouTube Shorts for Music > Shorts is the only short-form platform that hands viewers to a permanent catalogue. How to link a Short to the full track, and why it outlives every other post. [All guides](/blog) # How to Use YouTube Shorts for Music Published 20 August 2026, 00:00 UTC · updated 12 August 2026, 21:30 UTC · by Loopin Shorts is the only vertical feed that hands a viewer straight to a permanent catalogue — and the only one where a post from last year still finds people. ## Link the Short to the full track Every Short can be attached to a long-form video, and that link appears as a banner on the Short itself. This is the mechanism that makes Shorts different: a viewer who likes eight seconds can be listening to the whole song in one tap without leaving the app. So upload the full song as a normal video first — even as a static-image visualiser — and attach every Short to it. Skipping this turns Shorts into a feed with no destination, which is what most artists do with it. ## Use the Official Artist Channel, not a second account If your music is distributed, YouTube generates topic channels for it. Claiming the Official Artist Channel merges those into your main channel so your Shorts, your videos and your auto-generated song pages all live under one name and one subscriber count. Do it through your distributor. Running Shorts on a separate personal channel splits your audience across two places and neither of them accumulates. ## Shorts have a long tail, so post differently Unlike other feeds, Shorts routinely resurface content weeks or months after upload. That changes what is worth posting: evergreen clips — a riff, a chorus, a technique — keep earning, while dated ones ("out this Friday") expire. Write text that will still make sense in six months. "Out now" ages into confusion; "the chorus of [song name]" does not. ## The title and description still matter Shorts are the only short-form posts that are genuinely searched. Put the song name and the genre in the title, and one line plus the full track link in the description — people do find Shorts by typing, which is not true anywhere else. Use one or two hashtags maximum, and make one of them your artist name so the whole body of work groups together. ## Repurpose everything, but re-cut the ending Post the clips you already made for other platforms, but remove any platform-specific watermark and re-cut the last half second so the loop is clean. Watermarked reuploads get suppressed and it is an easy thing to fix in the export. One shooting session then covers three feeds. The Short is the one that will still be delivering views next spring, which makes it the highest-return copy of the three. ## Frequently asked questions ### Should musicians use YouTube Shorts? Yes, and differently from other platforms. Shorts is the only vertical feed where you can attach the full track to the clip and where posts routinely resurface months later, so evergreen clips keep earning. ### How do I link a Short to my full song? Upload the full track as a normal video — a static visualiser is fine — then attach every Short to it. The link appears as a banner on the Short, so one tap takes a viewer from eight seconds to the whole song. ### Can I repost my TikToks to Shorts? Yes, but export without the platform watermark — watermarked reuploads get suppressed — and re-cut the last half second so the loop is clean. ## Related reads - [How to make a music video on your phone](/blog/how-to-make-a-music-video-on-your-phone) - [How to make a song snippet for TikTok](/blog/how-to-make-a-song-snippet-for-tiktok) - [How to export your song for streaming](/blog/how-to-export-your-song-for-streaming) --- Source: https://onloopin.com/blog/how-to-use-youtube-shorts-for-music