YouTube announced on Monday that it’s doubling the requirements for the Partner Program on 2/1/27
New creators will need at least 1,000 subscribers and either 8,000 qualified watch hours over 365 days, or 20 million qualified Shorts views over 90 days. Both numbers are exactly double what they are today and Youtube’s reasoning is that this is the first major overhaul of the program since 2018.
If you’re already in the Partner Program you’re grandfathered in but existing channels need 10 million (!!!) qualified Shorts views in the previous 90 days to keep earning ad and subscription revenue on Shorts. If you fall below it, you stay in the program but only keep earning revenue on your long-form videos.
8000 watch hours over a year is about 22 hours of watch time a day and I believe Youtube is trying to make a statement that watch hours are the new visual currency
Youtube also rolled out a new feature where you can turn a playlist into an actual show which can have its own seasons and numbered episodes. You pick whether it’s serial (watched in order, listed oldest to newest) or non-serial (episodes stand alone and list newest first) and from there you can add more seasons/reorder episodes
YouTube’s CEO said in 2024 that people were already watching more than a billion hours of YouTube on television screens every day, and if that’s where the viewing is happening, the interface has to look like the thing people already use in that room.
I have years of beatmaking sessions scattered between Twitch and YouTube and in my opinion a playlist is fine, but I think this new feature gives my beatmaking videos a chance to be viewed in a different way and showcased to different audiences.
DrewsThatDude — Automatic (Beatmaking Session) | Vault VI | R&B & Electronic
🎹 Chapters
00:00 Automatic Pt. 1
02:52 Rhodes
06:51 Bass
10:10 Background Synth
16:21 Bass Pt. 2
18:43 Guitar
23:34 Background Synth Pt. 2
25:49 Piano
30:21 Bell Synth
35:08 Automatic Pt. 2
37:15 Dub Bass
38:00 Layered Bass
39:50 Rhodes
42:42 Pizzicato Strings
45:18 Piano
49:07 Synth Lead Improv
💿 Hear it on Vault VI: https://WeHadOurTime.lnk.to/VaultVI
▶️ Watch the session
From Scratch
Season 1 — Vault III. Where most of this started. Includes “Like Where I’m Going,” which is also where I stop building for a few minutes and talk about working with Mac Miller.
Season 2 — Vault V + Zodiac. “Grind,” “Tokyo,” “Differences,” plus Taurus and Capricorn.
Season 3 — Across the Catalog. One session each from Vault VI, Vault IV, Heaven’s Gate, and We Had Our Time. “Automatic” opens it.
Season 4 — Unreleased. Sessions for beats that were never released and never named. These only exist here.
Season 5 — Flips + Collabs. Cookiee Kawaii. Popcaan with Drake and PARTYNEXTDOOR. Benny The Butcher. Plus building with J NICS and The Crushboys.
My mindset towards my youtube channel now
Publish what already exists before making anything new. Most people reading this have some version of it: a folder of ideas, a private playlist or anything you’ve been holding on to.
Structure over volume. I’m not focused on uploading more but really organizing what I have so that finishing one video,song or mix leads to another instead of a dead end.
Long-form is the lane. My sessions run twenty to fifty minutes and that was considered a liability in an attention-span argument but these days I’m not focused on chopping my videos into Shorts. Mainly because the ongoing Shorts requirement is ten million views every ninety days, and that number isn’t aimed for me honestly. I think the shorts can stay promotional in nature but always pointing to some type of longer video.
I’m excited to be working on the next part of the Vault series and new comic pages so I really want to focus on moving in the future and archiving a lot of my past work which is important to me.
You can watch a beat get built in 2020, then watch how different my approach and sound choices are in 2024, and the distance between those two is more interesting than either one on its own to me.
For paid subscribers
The Chat is where the next Vault and the new comic pages get previewed before anything is announced publicly.
Everything above is the past six years. The Chat is the next six months.
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We Had Our Time is a newsletter from Grammy-nominated composer DrewsThatDude and your source for music discovery with context. We share carefully curated playlists, deep dives on artists shaping sound, new releases, and independent career insights for navigating the industry.
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