A surprising amount of independent music marketing is undone by exporting at the wrong aspect ratio. It is a small decision with a disproportionate effect.
The short version
- TikTok, Reels, Shorts: 9:16 vertical. No exceptions.
- YouTube main channel: 16:9 wide.
- Spotify Canvas: 9:16 vertical, 3 to 8 seconds.
- Instagram feed: 4:5 works, 1:1 is safe, 9:16 for Reels.
Why letterboxing hurts you
If you post a wide video to a vertical platform, you get black bars top and bottom. Two things then happen.
The visible one is that your video occupies about a third of the screen while everything else in the feed fills it. You lose on contrast alone.
The less visible one matters more: black bars are a strong signal of reposted content. Platforms are actively trying to suppress material that was made for somewhere else and dumped here, and letterboxing is the easiest possible tell. You are not just competing worse, you are being ranked lower before anyone sees it.
Cropping wide footage does not work well
The instinct is to shoot or generate wide and crop to vertical later. It rarely survives.
A wide composition puts the subject in a frame that is mostly horizontal information. Crop the sides off and you get the middle third, which is usually not where the interesting part was. Faces get cut, movement leaves frame, and anything you composed carefully is gone.
If vertical is where the video is going, make it vertical.
Generating both is now cheap
The old reason for picking one was cost. Shooting twice was not viable, so you shot wide and cropped, and accepted the compromise.
Generating removes that constraint. Producing a vertical version and a wide version means running the generation twice, which costs minutes rather than another shoot day. You get compositions that were actually designed for each frame.
Practical approach
- Decide the primary platform before you make anything
- Generate native vertical for short-form, composed for a phone
- Generate a wide version separately for YouTube if you need one
- Keep the same visual world across both so the release stays coherent
- Never crop a wide video into a vertical one and call it done
Safe zones
On vertical platforms, the interface eats your frame:
- Bottom fifth: captions, username, sound name
- Right edge: the button stack
- Top: occasionally a banner
Keep the subject centred and slightly high. Anything important in the bottom right corner will be sitting under a share button.