Spotify: Product Developments

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2024

February 2024

February 1, 2024: Spotify introduces “Share Track Lens”, a new feature that enables users to share songs on Snapchat. "The new “Share Track Lens” lets you capture the world around you on camera and easily share a track you’re loving. The lens will overlay the song title, artist name, cover art, and a link to listen to the track on Spotify, " Spotify wrote.

January 2024

January 24, 2024: Spotify said the DMA Act will pave way for Superfan Clubs. "Thanks to the DMA we’re looking forward to a future of superfan clubs, alternative app stores, and giving creators the ability to safely download Spotify for Artists or Spotify for Podcasters directly from our site—and that’s just the start." Superfan Clubs has been gaining a following lately, with Warner Music Group and Universal Music Group saying they will focus more on it in 2024. Superfans are users willing to pay more for anything related to their favourite artists. According to Goldman Sachs's projections, Superfans could account for 20% of total music premium subscribers in 2024 and their total addressable market (TAM) is $4.2 billion. Goldman Sachs forecasts that monetization of Superfans could bring in $2 billion in additional revenue to streaming platforms by 2027 and $4 billion by 2030.

2023

December 2023

December 14, 2023: Spotify confirmed to Techcrunch that it's testing a new feature that enables users to create playlists using AI technology and prompts. “We routinely conduct a number of tests. Some of those tests end up paving the path for our broader experience and others serve only as an important learning,” a Spotify spokesperson said. “We don’t have anything further to share at this time.” Techcrunch reported in October that Spotify was testing the feature, citing screenshots of the feature shared by tech veteran Chriss Messina.

November 2023

November 21, 2023: Spotify confirms Music Business Worldwide (MBW) report that said the company will come up with a new royalty payment model that would see migration of $1 billion to the right artists in the next 5 years.

November 16, 2023: Spotify will launch its podcast advertising marketplace in five new markets, including Sweden and India. Launched in 2021, Spotify Audience Network, which helps podcasters monetize their content, is available in nine countries such as the United States and Germany. "We often hear from our customers that they have been reticent to invest in podcasts because of the lack of audience targeting and challenges reaching podcast listeners at scale," Brian Berner, global head of advertising sales at Spotify, said. "The Spotify Audience Network addresses these two challenges head-on." November 16, 2023: To improve discovery and personal recommendations of audiobooks and podcasts, Spotify will use Google Cloud Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify users' listening habits. Currently, new podcasts and audiobooks are suggested to users on Spotify's home screen and the “More like this section” feature, which have not been very reliable.

November 14, 2023: Spotify users can now save music they hear in TikTok directly to Spotify. Currently, the feature is only available to Spotify free and premium users in the UK and U.S. “No matter where you are, or the moment you’re in, we want to create less work to get to the audio you love,” says Sten Garmark , Vice President, Global Head of Consumer Experience at Spotify. “That means being everywhere our users are and creating seamless ways to save songs to Spotify to enjoy when and how they choose to listen.”

November 8, 2023: Spotify premium users in the U.S join those in the U.K. and Australia in enjoying the 15-hour free audiobook listening time per month. Users who exhaust the 15 hours before the month ends can purchase 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 audiobook listeners are more likely to listen to additional audiobooks after listening to one.

October 2023

October 24, 2023: According to Music Business Worldwide (MBW), Spotify plans to come up with a new royalty payment model in Q1 2024  that would see the migration of USD $1 billion to ‘legitimate’ artists and rightsholders in the next 5 years through the following ways;

• 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.”

• Spotify will fine music distributors for fraudulent activity detected in their tracks.

• Introducing a minimum length of play time for non-music content that must be reached to earn royalties. Currently non-music content earns royalty in every 31-second interval.

 “We’re always evaluating how we can best serve artists, and regularly discuss with partners ways to further platform integrity," Spotify spokesperson said when contacted for a response. “We do not have any news to share at this time.”

October 17, 2023: Spotify launches a dedicated Merch Hub in its app.Previously, a merch could only be purchased from artist's profile. With the hub, users can access all the artists merch instead of having to browse from one artist to the other. The hub uses personalized recommendations based on your listening habits to march you with the artist merch.

October 9, 2023: In an effort to gain more paid users, Spotify is putting restrictions on its free tier feature in India. The restrictions include the inability to play songs in a manual order, rewind, and repeat songs. The new free tier is now almost similar to the one offered in Brazil. According to Spotify, India is one of the top five countries in terms of monthly active users, but doesn't fall into the top five category in terms of paid subscribers.

October 5, 2023: Spotify revamps artists profile page into Music, Concerts, and Merch. The Music tap features artist's albums and tracks as well as Clips. Clips are 30-second short-form videos that enable artists to tell their stories. Spotify said Clips is still in beta and only few artists have access to it. Artists can add fundraising links to the Music tab, enabling them to crowdsource funds from their fans. Additionally, artists can use the music tap to showcase their top tracks as well as important things such as upcoming events. Music tap also features an artist's bio, which is less than 1,500 words. The Events tap enable fans to purchase tickets to a forthcoming event or tap "interested" to receive updates on new events. Spotify said their test on Events resulted in a 70% increase in engagement with concerts and drove purchase of concert tickets by 15%. These tickets are purchased from Spotify's third party partners such as AXS, DICE, NoCap, Ticketek, etc. Meanwhile, Merch enable fans to browse and purchase up to 12 artist's available merch linked from Shopify. The most recently listed merches will appear first, enabling artists to continue building a relationship with their fans. Spotify said it saw a 22% increase in users merch purchasing merch through artist's profile.

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. 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.

September 2023

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.

September 26, 2023: Spotify launches Jam, a new personalized tool for creating playlists by group of people in real-time. Jam enables premium subscribers to invite other Spotify users to contribute music through a shared queue. Anyone who is on the shared Wi-Fi can contribute to the Jam but premium listeners can join anywhere, whether in the same room or across the world. It builds on technology used in Collaborative Playlists and Blend, that makes music sharing easier. Spotify said more than 45 million Blends have been created and last month alone, users spent over 200 million hours listening to Collaborative Playlists. The company said it will launch Jam globally starting today.

September 26, 2023: Daniel EK, Spotify CEO said the company will not completely ban content generated using AI. He said AI could be used to improve music, mimic artist and create content that are influenced by existing artists but doesn't directly impersonate them. EK said the industry is facing a big challenge when it comes to AI. "You can imagine someone uploading a song, claiming to be Madonna, even if they're not. We've seen pretty much everything in the history of Spotify at this point with people trying to game our system," Ek said. "We have a very large team that is working on exactly these types of issues."

September 25, 2023: Spotify is testing Voice Translation for podcasts, a feature that translates podcasts into local languages and which uses AI to mimic podcaster's voice. The company said it has worked with podcasters Dax Shepard, Monica Padman, Lex Fridman, Bill Simmons, and Steven Bartlett to come up with AI-powered voice translations in other languages such as Spanish, French, and German for some current and future podcast episodes. Spotify said that voice translations for Dax Shepard’s eff won with DRS, The Rewatchables from The Ringer, and Trevor Noah’s upcoming original podcast will soon be generated. The translated episodes will be available to both free and premium users. Spotify currently has more than 100 million regular podcast listeners.

September 22, 2023: According to the Verge, Spotify could be getting closer to launching the long-awaited HiFi. The HiFi would come in the form of the “Supremium” tier and could include the ability to create playlists with AI. The Verge cited a code found in the Spotify app by a Reddit user. The Redditor's findings corroborate a Bloomberg report published in June 2023 that indicated that Spotify's lossless audio will come in the form of a “Supremium” tier. Additionally, the tier will feature 30 hours of audiobook listening per month, according to the Redditor. The tier will also feature other music mixing tools such as customization tools and tools for filtering songs by mood and genre. The Redditor also discovered that the price listed for “Supremium” tier is $19.99 per month though this could just be a placeholder. “At Spotify, we are constantly iterating and ideating to improve our product offering and offer value to users,” Spotify spokesperson CJ Stanley told The Verge. “But we don’t comment on speculation around possible new features and do not have anything new to share at this time.”

September 12, 2023: Spotify launched Showcase, a music marketing tool that enables artists to promote new and previous realeases to their chosen listeners at the right time. Showcase is a sponsored recommendation that appears at the top of Spotify's Home. Spotify said people who see Showcase are 6x more likely to stream the promoted music. Showcase also allows artists to book multiple compaigns for different settings such as different markets and listeners. The tool helps you reach listeners in more than 30 markets including countries in Europe, South America, North America and Oceania. Showcase will provide you with user engagement data after 24 hours of using it. Its budget start at $100 when booked using Spotify for Artists and will run for 14 days after your compaign starts or until the budget is spent. The budget is only spend when listeners click on it and the cost-per-click (CPC) starts at $0.40 CPC. To maximize value for your budget, Showcase filters out people who have already clicked on it.

September 12, 2023: Spotify adds Daylist to its personalized playlists. Daylist will update many times throughout the day with new tracks and titles to reflect your moods based on how you use the Spotify app. For instance, if you listen to happy and upbeat music on certain mornings, you might get a suggestion like 'happy dance." Daylist comes with an in-built sharing feature that has ready-made screenshot, personalized sticker, or customizable sharecard. The new feature will initially be available to both free and premium users in English-speaking countries such as U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland. In the coming months, the feature will expand to more users globally.

September 6, 2023, Spotify CFO, Paul Vogel, said during Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference that AI DJ has been one of their most successful products. “Reviews have been amazing, and it’s something that’s very differentiated, that consumers love, that the artists love because it’s getting the content out there, and so we’re going to continue to invest in those types of things," he said. On podcasting, he said that they are the largest player in many countries they participate in and that they feel good about their market share and growth. “We feel really good about where we are in terms of our market share and our growth and our presence in podcasting," Vogel said. He added that Spotify originals will continue to be part of their strategy. “We continue to believe that creating podcasts and having Spotify originals will still be a part of the strategy. We’re also going to think about what’s the best way to produce that content with the business partner with that content. What’s the best way to share in the risk and the reward of that content with our partners?”he said.

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.

August 2023

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.