Spotify really, really wants you to know it's not just an app for streaming music anymore.
To prove it, the, er, music-streaming company today announced a slew of new features that will now be accessible within the Spotify app, including video content, podcasts, and even original running music created by Spotify to match your individual running tempo.
Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and several top-ranking execs announced the changes at a celebrity-studded event in New York City that featured appearances by the stars of Comedy Central's Broad City, which will be releasing clips through Spotify's new video tool; a live performance by soul artist D'Angelo; and a brief interview with Tiesto, who worked with Spotify to create its new running feature. The announcement, which ran an hour long and mimicked the kind of theatrics most commonly associated with that little outfit in Cupertino, was live-streamed to countries around the world.
So yeah, Spotify seriously wants your attention before someone else steals it first. The problem is, there are already plenty of companies satisfying that appetite for music and video. And there's about to be one more.
In just a few weeks, at its Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple is expected to announce the relaunch of Beats Music---the Spotify rival acquired in its $3 billion purchase of Beats Electronics---as its own Apple-branded streaming music service. As with all Apple product announcements, this one will inevitably (and maybe even rightly) come with a healthy heaping of hype, which Apple users tend to gobble right up.
So it's understandable that Spotify would feel pressured to offer users more---much more---in order to keep them coming back to Spotify. Until now, that hasn't been much of a problem for the company, which Ek said today now accounts for half of the global streaming market. Spotify listeners have streamed some 25 billion hours of music on the platform. Ek did the math for us, noting that equates to 3 million years of streaming.
"Spotify is the growth in streaming," Ek said on stage. And of course, he wants it to stay that way. So, it seems Spotify's thinking is that if users can do more things on the app---listen to their favorite podcasts, watch original videos from VICE and other publisher partners (including WIRED), and even, if you're a barista, control the playlist at Starbucks---they'll rarely have a reason to leave Spotify. "I'd like for users to start Spotify in the morning and not really pause it until they go to sleep," says chief product officer Gustav Söderström. "That would be ideal."
In all likelihood, Spotify users are going to like these features. The goal of Spotify's new playlist tool, for instance, is to serve up music for each user based on his or her demographics and the time of day. Over time, it will learn more about what that user likes in order to help her discover music, and now video, more easily. "Spotify has always been about when you know exactly what you wanted to play, because you went to the search box for it," Söderström says. "We’re trying to change that."
Other features, like the running tool that uses your phone's accelerometer to pick songs for your particular pace, are also pretty unique among the major streaming services. So, if you already spend a lot of time on Spotify, and suddenly, you can do more on Spotify, why wouldn't you? That is, no doubt, good news for the company. As Söderström says, "Growth comes from engagement. Every time we increase engagement the likelihood people tell a friend increases."
And yet, the question here is not whether Spotify users will like Spotify more, but whether expanding the platform in this way will actually convince non-Spotify users to sign up. Because Spotify is not targeting a market that is underserved. Far from it. It's targeting a market that everyone from Apple to YouTube to Jay-Z want so badly that consumers already have an overabundance of good options in front of them.
Spotify now has to convince them that it really is that much better. But that won't be easy, considering Apple's ability to act as a black hole for the world's attention. Over the next few months, we'll see if Spotify can escape the vortex.
