Source: Spotify
I was discussing last week with the students about the TikTok-tification of apps: Instagram, Amazon, Netflix, Shein, Reddit, Youtube, and many others. Of course, Spotify could not miss this trend and announced yesterday their new design app
Main takeaways from the event:
1/ The user interface moved from being static to …alive and interactive
2/ By introducing separate feeds the company has more leverage to introduce more ads
3/ Like Apple, Spotify is pursuing a much more clear differentiation between the free and premium plans (e.g. the latter has AI DJ and other new features)
4/ Vertical scrolling is coming to Spotify (hint! taping is better)
5/ The audience at this event was only artists (e.g. musicians, podcasters etc). Spotify wants the platform to be the “go-to” for all artists. They can take leverage of all the analytics, all infrastructure and focus on want they want: creating stuff
6/ Finally, artists can create their own communities in the app which will nurture and eventually monetize (e.g. merch, concerts tickets etc)
7/ One of the announcements that I really like was a feature called “Clips” – which lets artists add a 30-second video. (for podcasting or audiobooks it offers also autogenerated subtitles)
Spotify wants to be a better aggregator because it will never be a super aggregator (like Google or Meta). Somehow, the music industry was not disrupted like most industries by aggregators. The labels are the real winners.
To have a zero marginal acquisition cost per user Spotify needs to come up with different services (ie. podcasts) and different ways to monetize music (ie. bidding for songs in playlists etc)
