On Wednesday, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced that his music-streaming platform was about to become much, much more than a music-streaming platform.
First things first: presumably taking a cue from Songza, the app that suggests playlists to match your mood or activity (e.g. “Quitting Your Job,” “Every ’90s Summer Dance Party,” “I’m a Boss”), Spotify will introduce “The Now start page,” which looks a lot like the Songza landing page and, as Spotify describes it, give you “the right music day and night.”
On top of revamping the music experience, Spotify wants to get visual. The app will offer video for the first time, along with live radio, news, and podcasts. Mirroring the promise of Jay Z’s much-maligned Tidal, the allure here is supposed to be original content from stars like Amy Poehler and the Broad City broads, who were in attendance at Wednesday’s launch event in midtown Manhattan. This “new Spotify” also includes partnerships with a few little start-ups you may recognize: Disney, Adult Swim, ESPN, BBC, Viacom, TED. Radio shows will be curated by the likes of Tyler the Creator and Icona Pop.
More exciting and/or more invasive, depending on how you feel about apps following you throughout your day and integrating themselves seamlessly into your life: Spotify Running, which will track your running tempo and provide songs with the right BPM to match. (This summer, Spotify will partner with Nike, for the synergistic experience of accessing Spotify Running through the Nike+ app.)
At the launch event, Ek told media that his goal is to give listeners a “true soundtrack to your life.” This means playlists for just about everything you could possibly do, because how would you deal if you went to brush your teeth in while changing into pajamas and you did not have a “Dental Care In My Underwear” playlist to accompany this experience?!? We still don’t have flying cars, male birth control, or a cure for the common cold. But you will have multiple apps offering up playlists that use memory recognition software to track what music you’ve been listening to and use that data to inform future song selection. Every generation gets the technology it deserves.
As these apps become more and more tuned in to what we’re tuning into, maybe there will eventually be a marketplace for the exact opposite service: an entertainment platform that promises to not keep tabs on your listening habits, how frequently your feet hit the ground while you run, when you take a shower, how often you hit repeat on that cheesy pop song you’d never listen to in public but when you play it on your headphones it reminds you of being sixteen.
The news isn’t a total surprise, not just because the Wall Street Journal reported that the seven-year-old company was planning to “enter the hotly competitive Web-video business” earlier this month. While streaming services are more lucrative than ever — last year, for the first time in the history of the music industry, streaming services earned more revenue than CD sales — it is also a more crowded field than ever. Spotify is competing with old standbys (Pandora, founded in 2000) and rookies with major backing (Songza, recently purchased by Google; Tidal, willed into existence by Jay Z and Beyonce and backed by their celebrity friends in the Illuminati). That’s not even counting iTunes, SoundCloud, YouTube, and the always-thriving industry of illegal downloads. Piracy never says die.
Offering music — even a lot of music at a reasonable price, as Spotify does — just isn’t enough anymore.