With the recent addition of comments to podcasts, Spotify is taking another step toward making its app, which is mostly known for music, more like a social networking site. Commenting lets podcasters interact with their fans right in Spotify, just like Polls and Q&As let them do with other features. The 2023 update to the app added a discovery feed like on TikTok, artist profiles where creators can sell merchandise and concert tickets, and the ability to post to stories. This makes Spotify’s app more like a social network for all things audio, not just a music-streaming app.
This week, comments were added to podcast episode pages, which is a pretty cool social networking tool. Now the question is whether Spotify will ever add something similar for music artists. Fans of musicians are usually bigger and more involved than fans of most podcasts, so this could make the app even more appealing.
When we talked to Maya Prohovnik, Spotify’s VP of Podcast Product, about the start of comments, we asked if comments could also be added to artist pages.
While Prohovnik didn’t say for sure that such an idea wasn’t being thought about, he did say, “I can see a world where we extend [support for comments] to other formats on Spotify, but we always want to do what is right for the format and those types of creators and artists.”
Apple, Spotify’s main rival, has already tried to add a social network to a music app.
Steve Jobs unveiled Ping, iTunes’ new social network, in 2010. He said it was like “Facebook and Twitter meet iTunes” and that it was a “social network all about music.” Jobs was clearly on to something, but Ping never had any luck while Jobs was still alive. Apple shut down Ping in 2012, not long after Jobs died. It was one of the few times that the iPhone maker failed. Later, Apple tried again with Connect, a social tool for musicians, but it didn’t work either.
Even now, Apple’s streaming music service, Apple Music, has a feature that checks your contacts every so often to suggest new friends to follow so you can see what they’re listening to. This is an extra feature that shows you what your contacts are listening to.
When compared to Apple, though, Spotify has never come out and said that it was building a social network for music.
Instead, the company has slowly and quietly added a number of features that make the app more social for both producers and fans. During its update last year, Spotify added video feeds to all of its Home pages, such as the ones for Music, Podcasts, and now Audiobooks. Even though the designs of those posts have been changed since launch, the move showed that Spotify was learning from TikTok, which is Gen Z’s favorite social network, when making its own product.
During Spotify’s Q1 2024 earnings call, CEO Daniel Ek talked about TikTok’s impact. He told investors that TikTok and other apps had “improved the user experience” and that the industry was “learning about these trends and trying to improve our products.”
“Nobody is different from us when it comes to trying to learn from the market,” Ek said, referring to how the app was modeled after TikTok. “We find out what people like.” We work to make it better and give users the best experience possible.
In the past year, the company also added new ways for artists to connect with fans through a tool called Spotify Clips, which worked like Instagram Stories. This was a place where artists could add 30-second videos to their record.
With Countdown Pages, artists can also get fans excited about new releases. Fans can also still hear from their favorite artists through video messages through Spotify’s annual Wrapped promotion. In the meantime, Spotify users can still follow artists and friends to find out about new music and events and see what their friends are playing. There are many ways for them to work together on playlists with other people, even in real time. People have seen the company testing a Community tool that would let users see what other people were streaming in real time.
With comments, Spotify hopes to create an app where people don’t just play music and then put their phone back in their pocket, but where they’re actively participating and sharing their thoughts, feelings, and views, like they would on a regular social network.
Also Read: Spotify is Testing Video Classes That Teach Everything From How to Make Music to How to Use Excel
When you put all of these features together, they make the app more than just another music streamer. It wants to fight for users’ time and, eventually, the money advertisers spend on bigger social networks.
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