Digital business news
By Chris Cooke | Posted on Wednesday, August 10, 2022
Spotify is rolling out a redesign to its app’s home screen that it says will make it easier to navigate the platform’s content, primarily by more clearly separating music from podcasts.
Spotify said in a post yesterday: “This week we’re launching a new home experience that includes streams for music and podcasts and shows. The feature is currently rolling out to Android users and will soon be available on iOS.”
“By creating these feeds,” he added, “Spotify will help listeners easily scroll through the type of content they’re looking for at the time. The updated interface will make the experience more personalized while allowing users to further deepen their recommendations”.
“In the Music feed,” he continues, “listeners will have quick access to suggestions based on their musical tastes, making it easier than ever to discover new favorites. There will also be album and playlist recommendations as well as buttons to easily share, like and instantly play music.”
And, he continues, “in the Podcast & Shows feed, listeners will be able to directly access new episodes of their favorite shows. They will also find personalized podcast recommendations. Plus, listeners will be able to read episode descriptions, check in to your episodes, or start playing podcasts without leaving the page, so the experience starts from one place.”
Adorable stuff. Elsewhere in Spotify news, Music Ally reported yesterday that the streaming company is piloting a new site that sees it directly selling tickets for a small number of concerts taking place in the United States. Although Spotify already offers tickets for shows to its users based on the tracks they have listened to, these tickets are currently sold by ticketing companies with which the streaming company has partnerships.
Given all the user data Spotify sits on and its ability to target shows to relevant fans, some have long speculated that the streaming company could one day move more proactively into box office. That said, main ticketing is an incredibly difficult business to get into, with most artists and promoters allocating most of their tickets to a small number of established ticketing agents.
These ticket agents are also sitting on vast amounts of live music-specific user data – and that’s becoming increasingly sophisticated now that mobile ticketing is finally becoming the norm. Additionally, promoters often look to their ticketing partners to help them with cash flow as well as marketing, making it harder for new entrants to get into the market.
And that’s before you consider the fact that the largest live music company in the world, i.e. Live Nation, also owns the largest ticketing company in the world, i.e. Ticketmaster .
These challenges proved too much for many ticketing start-ups to overcome, even when their products offered both a better experience for users and better data for promoters. And it’s not just start-ups that have struggled to take on the existing ticketing giants, after all, Amazon’s grand ticketing plans haven’t come to much. But could Spotify overcome these challenges? Who knows?
Although, it should be noted, the new pilot has much more modest ambitions, focusing on a small number of pre-sale ticket offers for superfans.
And the streaming company is keen to stress that this is indeed an experimental pilot, telling Music Ally: “At Spotify, we regularly test new products and ideas to improve our user experience. Some of them end up paving the way for our broader user experience and others just serve as important learnings. Tickets.spotify.com is our last test. We have no further news to share on future plans at this time.”
