You can officially check off Spotify on your "Apps with an Endless Doom Scroll" Bingo board.
Last month, Spotify announced what is likely the biggest overhaul to its mobile app design in its history, and unsurprisingly, central to this redesign is a new scrollable discovery feed that gives you recommendations for music, podcasts, and audiobooks you might enjoy and lets you quickly listen to a few seconds of them.
Everything about this makes me curl up in the fetal position and plead for a single app that doesn't have a sloppy crush on TikTok. But that doesn't keep me from thinking this might end up being a brilliant feature for Spotify.
Music discovery is broken (though that would imply it was ever solved in the first place, which I would also debate). For the last fifteen years of streaming, our idea of "music discovery" has been slapping people across the face with an algorithmic playlist, and as enjoyable as these were on the lucky occasion, I think the experience for more people than not looked more like this: You're itching for new music. You find a playlist. You click shuffle. Within two minutes you completely forgot you were listening to music. And an hour later, the playlist ends. That's it.
I hate everything about the idea that you can discover art that truly shakes you within five seconds. Most of my all-time favorite songs — "Life On Mars?" by David Bowie, "There is A Light That Never Goes Out" by The Smiths, "Pictures of You" by The Cure, "God Only Knows" by The Beach Boys — are songs that I enjoyed on first listen but I didn't love until my 20th. Developing that sort of relationship with a piece of music takes time.
But not everyone has time. Most people are far too busy to spend every Monday morning sitting on their floor with their Discover Weekly and some incense, listening through every measure of every song with a sniper's focus. People listen to music most often when they're distracted by something else, whether that's driving or working or running or whatever. So if Spotify's thesis is, "People will be more successful finding music they love by devoting all their attention to five seconds of a second than devoting a quarter of their attention to its entirety," I wouldn't disagree with them. Maybe you won't immediately find your next tattoo inspiration, but if it at least points you in the direction of a sound or artist that piques your interest, that's still a much-needed service.
Discovery is still the biggest frontier for differentiation in this space. People will have their Spotify vs Apple Music tiffs, but the truth is both apps do virtually the same things with the same music library and are pretty successful in their approach. What can genuinely get Spotify to leap frog any other service is if it can say, "You will discover five times as much new music you love on our platform than with any other competing service." That would make Spotify a no-brainer (correction: that would make Spotify a no-brainer, once they get their heads out of their 320 kbps backsides and launch Spotify HiFi). And changing the UI to get this many micro-signals from users on the music they do and don't like will help Spotify's recommendation engine get much sharper, much faster.
That doesn't mean I believe everything the company says about how its positioning this new feature. They might claim this change is all because they see discovery as "the lifeblood of Spotify" and that their goal is "not to steal time," but I call BS. I think they really know the lifeblood for any high-growth tech company right now is user attention. The company has never turned an annual profit and knows it needs to seek out alternative revenue sources to eventually do so. This new UI is just begging for labels to swoop in and begin shelling out millions of dollars so your captive eyes and ears can be spoon-fed the new Meghan Trainor single, and I predict these sorts of promoted posts are exactly what Spotify will begin doing within the next three years. Spotify is a better platform if you listen to more music you want to listen to, but it's a better business if you listen to more music it wants you to listen to.
So we'll see if this catches on. Like all UI changes, I expect listeners will brandish their pitchforks for the first few months, but all it takes is one great find for a listener to think, "You know what, I kinda like this."
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