Key Takeaways
- Spotify’s interactive features like Wrapped and artist collaboration enhance the user experience.
- Selling merchandise on Spotify provides artists with a direct link to their fans.
- Podcast Comments on Spotify could evolve into a broader social network, improving user interaction.
- Advanced discovery features make it easier to find the music you like, discover new artists, and share it with your network.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably noticed Spotify become an increasingly interactive platform. There is more sharing, linking, and integration than ever before, which, to me, feels like Spotify is pushing to become a new social media platform.
Spotify Wrapped and Artist Collaboration
As we use Spotify, it keeps tabs on our habits and preferences, individually and across its almost 600 million-strong user base. Each year, Spotify compiles this data and presents it as part of Spotify Wrapped. This is a celebration of the year’s top artists, tunes, albums, and podcasts, as well as a personalized experience based on your Spotify usage. The information is presented in a funky user interface, accessed via your browser or the Spotify app.
You can use Spotify Wrapped to view personal playlists for your most-played artists and songs, view the previous year in music to see what others have been listening to, buy concert tickets and merchandise, and view information on upcoming tours. One of my favorite features of Spotify Wrapped is its Create a Blend function, which allows you to compile your previous year’s listening experience. This can then be shared with other Spotify users, just like you might share a photo album on social media. It is also possible to view and share your old Spotify Wrapped playlists going back several years.
Spotify Wrapped also encourages interaction from artists with an Artist Messages feed so you can get a bigger picture of what is happening in their personal and professional lives, just as you can with their Facebook, Twitter, or TikTok accounts. In turn, they receive their personal Artist and Creator Wrapped experience, allowing them to better understand their fans and followers.
Selling Merchandise on Spotify
Whether you are a bonafide star or an up-and-coming hopeful looking to build your fanbase, Spotify facilitates buying and selling your merchandise on its platform, just as you can with a Facebook or Instagram shop. This can be both a valuable marketing tool and an effective way for individuals to express their affiliation with their favorite artists and creators.
The merchandise service allows artists to sell products directly to their fans as they stream their songs or albums with a link to their integrated Spotify merch store. The store is built on the Shopify platform and linked to the artist’s Spotify page. It can then be configured to sell relevant merchandise when a new single or album release drops, advertise specific merchandise on album and release pages, and automatically remove unavailable items from Spotify feeds.
This means that we can easily purchase legitimate merchandise produced to the artist’s agreed standards without our money going to third-party manufacturers for second-rate products. It also means that we have access to the latest merchandise, much of which is unique to Spotify, which can include anything from limited vinyl releases to books, clothing, and paraphernalia like jewelry and guitar picks.
Spotify released a Comments feature for podcasts in July 2024, following a user poll conducted back in 2021. This represents a significant step for the platform, as it means that users can interact directly with creators and other users in much the same way as we already could with YouTube comments and other forms of social media.
There are many benefits to using Spotify to listen to your favorite podcasts, including Podcast Comments. This feature allows podcast creators to have two-way conversations with their audience and scan the comment feed to see what listeners think of a specific episode. It helps them provide better service by tuning their content to suit the audience and responding to user queries and requests in real time. It also gives us a platform to discuss content and react to a specific part of the program as it happens. Furthermore, it means we can build a community around our favorite podcasts with people who share similar interests.
If successful, Podcast Comments could be the proving ground for Spotify’s launch of an interactive comments feed on its music platform. This would allow users to exchange views on current releases, share playlists, and provide essential feedback to artists while building music-focused communities. Whether or not this expansion happens, Podcast Comments is already a bonafide social network, proving that the company is taking social interaction seriously.
Improved Personalization With Dynamic Discovery
When Spotify rolled out its advanced discovery function in March 2023, it stated that this was the most significant step yet made in the platform’s evolution. It aimed to improve the connection between artists and their audience and allow its listeners to play a more active role in how audio is presented and discovered among over 100 million tracks, 6 million podcast titles, and more than 350,000 audiobooks accessible on Spotify.
This development has improved Spotify’s interactivity with easier sharing and discovery, using Twitter-style hashtags to find new tracks within a specific genre. We can also sample tracks more efficiently, with visual representations of the tracks for quicker identification. Its interactive design makes it easier to zone in on what we are looking for using general or specific metrics and find new artists, music, and other media based on our personal preferences.
With its dynamic discovery update, Spotify feels more like browsing through a well-organized record store with knowledgeable staff who give helpful recommendations. It enables us to expand our musical horizons while giving Spotify access to valuable information to build more accurate customer profiles. Since improving its discovery feed, Spotify has continued to strive for better interactivity with its user base, increasing speculation that it will eventually become a fully developed social network.
Would a Fully-Fledged Social Network Improve Spotify?
While it is hard to say whether a Spotify music-based social network would be successful, history has shown us that it’s not a foregone conclusion. As far back as 2010, Steve Jobs introduced the short-lived Apple Ping, which was to be a music-focused social network centered around the iTunes platform. Needless to say, this never found a firm footing with Apple users, and it was quietly dissolved around two years later.
However, much has changed in the intervening years since the ill-fated Apple Ping, and social media is a very different space to what it was then. If Spotify were to launch a fully-fledged social network, I could see the benefit of having a music-based community that focuses on my musical interests, where I could have discussions and get recommendations for new music from like-minded folks who also share my appreciation for classic rock and disco. The sheer amount of choice can be overwhelming on a streaming platform like Spotify, where we have almost every imaginable track at our fingertips, and I, for one, could use the help.
