We’re all aware of Spotify’s dominance in the streaming industry. With over 100 million tracks and 365 million monthly active users, Spotify have now started to implement their plans to continue their music industry takeover. How? By becoming more like TikTok...

On March 8th at their Stream On event, Spotify launched their future plans to focus on interactivity and creating meaningful engagement between creators and fans. Like Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and TikTok, Spotify is now entering the vertical video feed arena with its latest feed for discovery feature.‍

What is the new feed for discovery update?‍

The new Spotify Discovery feed will feature short personalised videos and audio clips which come as sample song recommendations for Spotify users. Audiences can interact with these videos, add songs to playlists, share them with friends, or use the hashtags in the videos to generate songs in a similar genre. 

‍

What are the benefits?‍

Spotify’s main objective for this feature is for artists to develop a strong relationship with their fanbase. The videos will allow artists to drive audience interest in their music and will help to expand artist’s visibility on the app acting in a similar way to the TikTok For You page.

Spotify for Artists is also adding updates including 'previews', where listeners sample a track before they play or save, 'shortcuts' which give users easy access to some of their recent and favourite listens and 'smart shuffle'.

Overall, these updates are aimed to help artists find more success on the platform. 

Why the change?

This feature was made to create a better way to sample music, as Spotify wants users to have more power in discovering the songs they enjoy and make the app more interactive. Spotify is repositioning as a one-stop shop where, rather than doom scrolling, you can use previews to create a dedicated playlist and find more content you will enjoy - essentially they are trying to compete with TikTok. 

What are your thoughts? We'd be keen to hear. Send us an email at hello@comeswithfries

If you want to find out more about the upcoming changes, you can check out Spotify’s press release here.

‍