YouTube Shorts will now let you use up to 60 seconds of licensed music

The battle for who will prevail in the field of mini videos is extremely fierce and Google may have found a way to give YouTube Shorts a competitive advantage against Meta's Reels and ,of course, TikTok.

The company's latest move is to give content creators the ability to use up to 60 seconds of licensed music in their videos, of course without having to pay for the usage rights. This is a significant advantage compared to the 15 second limit that existed until recently.

The company makes it clear that the 30-60 second limit per YouTube Short applies to the majority of songs, but there are some exceptions that will still limit usage to 15 seconds. Note, however, that content creators will know in advance how many seconds they can use from YouTube's audio picker.

This is an extremely important boost for content creators, since during all these years of YouTube dominance one of the biggest issues was the aggressive policy of the competent copyright protection authorities who took down videos from the service in case there was use of even a few seconds from licensed music.