During its 90-minute Stream On presentation broadcast live from Los Angeles, Spotify announced major design changes to its app, including new vertical video feeds and a built-in pre-save button. Instead of a static carousel of playlists and recommendations, users will now be shown visual and audio previews of playlists, albums, podcast episodes, and audiobooks in an endless vertical video feed. Previews are also integrated into the search function.
In addition, a pre-save feature, long used by artists through various third-party apps to collect data and contact information about people who are excited about their music, will now be integrated directly into the Spotify app.
In a separate speech at a conference hosted by Morgan Stanley, Spotify’s chief financial officer Paul Vogel hailed the company’s 6 percent reduction in the global workforce as a “really positive,” suggesting the business had to ” evolve”.
Just a few days earlier, Soundcloud announced that it was testing a “TikTok-like” vertical video feed for music discovery. Like Spotify, it will offer music based on your listening history and music taste, but unlike the Swedes, Soundcloud will also display a line explaining why a particular song appears in its recommendations.
Spotify also recently debuted the Beta release of its custom AI guide called DJ. DJ is available to premium users in the US and Canada, and uses data about your listening habits to choose what to play. Last year Netflix shared the playlista fictional program on top of Spotify, and launched a website that allows users to buy concert tickets directly on the platform, cutting out middlemen like Ticketmaster.
