Spotify: Product Developments: Difference between revisions

November 8, 2023:  Spotify '''premium users in U.S''' join those in the U.K and Australia in enjoying the '''15-hour free audiobooks''' listening time per month. Users who exhaust the 15 hours before the month ends can purschase 10 additional hours. The audiobooks include over 70% of bestselling titles such as Britney Spears’ ''The Woman in Me'', Jesmyn Ward’s ''Let Us Descend'' , Paulo Coelho’s ''The Alchemist'' and Emily Brontë’s ''Wuthering Heights''. Spotify’s survey of 1,000 American adults found that 72% of Gen Z and Millennials listen to audiobooks and 70% of audiobooks listeners are more likely to listen to additional audiobooks after listening to one<ref>https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-11-08/audiobooks-us-spotify-premium-users/</ref>.

* Introducing a minimum number of streams per year that must be reached by an artist before starting to earn royalties, a move that will demonetize 0.5% of Spotify's royalty pool, resulting to diversion of tens of millions of dollars to more popular artists. “ In aggregate, these tracks generate royalties that add up to tens of millions of dollars a year, and that number is only growing," a source told MBW. “Next year, without taking this action, Spotify thinks they would have generated around $40 million.”

October 3, 2023: Spotify said '''Premium subscribers will now have access to more than 150,000 audiobooks.''' As a start, Premium Individual, Family and Duo accounts will have 15 hours of audiobooks listening time per month. The feature will be rolled out today in the U.K. and Australia. U.S premium users will have access to it before the end of the year. Users who deplete their 15 hours listening time before the month ends can purchase additional 10 hours to finish their series. Spotify added that Premium users can also download the audiobooks for offline listening. The audiobooks will include 70% of the New Yorks Time best seller<ref>https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-10-03/audiobooks-included-in-spotify-premium/</ref>. The Wall Street Journal had reported last month that Spotify was testing this feature and that it could offer up to 20 hours of free audiobooks per month<ref>https://www.investmentwiki.org/wiki/Spotify#Spotify_Audiobooks</ref>.   

September 29, 2023: Spotify introduces '''auto-generated time-synced transcripts to more podcast creators''' and shows. The company said it will rollout these transcripts to millions of episodes in the coming weeks. Additionally, Spotify wants to enable creators to add media to these transcripts in future. Spotify is also '''expanding podcast chapters to mobile users''', giving them more information about the episode they plan to listen to<ref>https://newsroom.spotify.com/2023-09-28/international-podcast-day-transcripts-chapters-show-pages-global/</ref>.  

September 5, 2023: Spotify starts testing whether to make the '''in-app lyrics feature a premium feature'''. Users have started noticing the lyrics locked away under a paywall. Instead of the lyrics popping up when a song is playing, users have been presented with a notification bubble that says, “Enjoy lyrics on Spotify Premium.” Users have also been presented with a link to sign up for the new premium feature. In response to this development, Spotify co-head of global communications, CJ Stanley said,  “At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests, some of those tests end up paving the way for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning.” “In keeping with our standard practices, we’re currently testing this with a limited number of users in a pair of markets." he said in a follow up statement<ref>https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/5/23860124/spotify-lyrics-premium-only-feature</ref>.

August 23, 2023: Spotify released a series of podcast tools and features including '''customization tools, new impression analytics, tools for editing podcast previews, expansion of automated ads, and new Spotify Audience Network Performance Dashboard''' for Megaphone enterprise publishers. With customization, podcasters will be able to personalize parts of their pages for the first time. For instance, they can add a bio and links to their social media pages. They can also introduce their pages by pinning some introductory episodes. Customization feature will be available to both hosted and non-hosted creators in the fall. Impression analytics will enable creators to know how their podcasts are being discovered. Spotify Audience Network Performance Dashboard for Megaphone enterprise publishers will display metrics such as CPMs and impressions delivered by each podcast. This dashboard will be available as from today. With auto-generated tags, listeners will be able to jump to any creator search results. By clicking on these tags, they will be able to find any content from a creator<ref>https://finance.yahoo.com/news/spotify-introduces-podcaster-tools-including-163035713.html</ref>.

== References ==