Tag Archives: Spotify

Spotify’s Greenroom Will Integrate to the Spotify App as Spotify Live

The audio based social media platform space blew up in the past couple of months. This is a space technically pioneered by Clubhouse. The app was so popular that other social media platforms paid attention. They wanted a piece of that pie as well. As a result, platform makers started looking into building their own platforms.  

Spotify developed their own platform too for audio based social media platform. They developed Greenroom, a Clubhouse clone in one way but with Spotify’s official colours plastered over everything on the platform. It is, in its own rights, quite a successful experiment by Spotify and it is among the only platforms of its kind that is still in existence, or rather, frequently visited.  

When they launched the platform though, it was launched as an app of its own. While you can use your regular Spotify account to get on to the platform and start having conversations with strangers about all sorts of topics, the app has no other correlation with the main Spotify app. We thought, perhaps Spotify Greenroom is meant to sit separately as a separate app since it does not offer any similar services to Spotify. Until now, that is. 

Based on what has been spotted on Spotify’s beta app, Spotify will be integrating Greenroom or Greenroom similar functionality into the main app itself. The feature will be renamed to Spotify Live instead though. There are rumours as well that the update will be rolling out in the second quarter of 2022. Though this might mean that Greenroom itself might be taken down and moved to the new platform under Spotify’s app, it does not mean that its functions and contents will be removed.  

It will fundamentally be the same as working with Greenroom, except that everything comes under one app now. While it does create a bigger, more complex app, it is a more sensible thing to do for Spotify. The platform within Spotify will allow content creators to organise and manage conversations on the app itself. Users can subscribe to content creators on the app itself and listen in on their LIVE conversations whenever their subscribed content creator creates the conversation room.  

Source: Bloomberg 

Spotify Moving up the Podcast Ladder with Two More Acquisition

Yesterday, news broke about Spotify making two more acquisitions. To be fair, it was more like Spotify announcing that they are making two more acquisitions for themselves. No, it is not really because they have excess cash in hand. It is more because the two acquisitions might just seal Spotify’s position as the king platform for podcasts.

The two companies that Spotify is acquiring are Podsights, and Chartable. Both acquisitions would see the technologies they offer integrate with Spotify’s or enhance their current platform. But you as a consumer might not immediately see the effects of the acquisition. At least, you might not immediately see it directly anyway.

Podsights, according to Spotify, is a leading podcast advertising measurement service provider. It is supposed to ensure that advertisers get more accurate advertising data on podcasts. In short, it is a sort of Google AdSense for podcasts.

Then there is Chartable, a podcast analytics tool provider. The tool allows podcasters to see data regarding their podcast audiences. This would help publishers understand their audiences better and produce more accurate information regarding their podcast. They can even make more informed decisions regarding their podcasts in that case. This would be like the Google Analytics for podcasts.

In a sense, these tools are not really made for end-users in mind. The two new technologies that Spotify will be acquiring exists to allow Spotify’s podcaster’s easy access to tools that could help them make their podcast better, and to even grow their podcasts in different ways. It could help advertisers understand how their ads work on podcasts as well, allowing them to make better decisions on the way they design their ads, or where to place them.

While the technologies attached with the companies Spotify aims to acquire are tailored for podcast, the audio streaming company sees application beyond podcasts. They aim to bring the technology to their full suite of services. This includes their music streaming and eventually videos as well. What they are saying is that they are going to introduce more targeted ads in their music streaming platform soon.

All this not only points to better podcast experience, but also better monetisation opportunities for podcasters. It also means that advertisers get more accurate data and would eventually be willing to spend more on ads within podcasts, music, and videos on Spotify itself. Of course, all this also means more money for Spotify. But beyond that, it ensures that Spotify’s podcasters stay with Spotify and grow with the platform. It will also attract more podcasters to be on the platform, which is always a win situation for Spotify.

The acquisition announcement currently is still merely that, an announcement. There are no mentions on how much the leading music streaming firm is spending on these two acquisitions. They also mentioned that Podsights will be operating as an entity independent from the team in Spotify. Their technologies will still be integrated in the platform’s podcast tools, we are guessing. The reason for the independence is most likely since Podsights have their own list of clienteles currently. For more information on the new acquisitions, you can head over to their blog.

Spotify Retiring Car View

Spotify looks to be retiring its simplified UI for drivers. The Car View mode was initially announced in 2019 as a way to prevent drivers from being distracted while driving. Spotify’s approach was to strip away most of the superfluous elements on the UI giving users a simplified UI. The UI basically only allowed users to do basic actions like skip, pause and rewind when activated.

However, it looks like Car View is being removed from the app. Android users will realise that Car View no longer launches when connected to a Bluetooth speaker. The removal of Car View from the Spotify app was confirmed by a support thread moderator. In the statement, the moderator said that the feature is being retired to “make way for new innovations” and that they are “actively exploring a variety of new ways to deliver the best in-car listening experience”.

Spotify Car Thing
Spotify Car Thing // Source: Spotify

While the retiring of the feature seems counter-intuitive, it isn’t really a handicap to the app as users are also able to interact with app via Google Assistant or, if you have a car with CarPlay or Android Auto, you can simply use the app in the dash. However, the timing of Spotify’s move to silently retire the feature is a little sus. The company only just recently released “Car Thing” a display device meant for older vehicles. The device delivers a similar experience to users who can’t use in-dash apps. That said, the USD$80 device is currently only available in the U.S. and Canada.

We’ll just have to wait and see whether a new version of Car View is in the works.

Spotify Tests TikTok Style Video Feeds for Discovering New Music

Spotify is one of the most popular audio streaming apps in the world. It is currently one of the most complete as well in terms of listening options. You do not only have music; you also get the largest collection of podcasts the world has seen so far. On top of that, it might be the cleverest audio streaming app you can find today.

Spotify features nifty ways for you to discover new music. The app understands the sorts of music you listen to daily and gives you suggestions to music that might match your music tastes, your playlists’ moods, or themes. You can even discover music with your friends now with the Spotify Blend feature.

Soon though, you might be able to discover music on Spotify in a brand-new way. You want to keep in mind that this is a feature not fully released to the final app, so you might want to take it with a pinch of salt. The feature was first spotted by a certain Chris Messina on Spotify’s TestFlight build, a beta Spotify app for the iOS. There are no mentions on whether you can find the feature on Android’s version of Spotify Beta apps.

As reported by TechCrunch, the new Discover feature is a button or tab of its own that takes up the fourth spot on Spotify’s navigation bar. Spotify has confirmed that they are in the midst of testing this new ‘Discover’ function. While it does sound like Spotify is simply adding a simple random music search feature to the app, you might want to take a closer look at it.

Discover is a sort of short-form video content that sits on Spotify. It can be likened to TikTok, yes. But the sole purposed of it is for users to discover new music. You cannot be freely posting contents into the platform like TikTok. Instead, the feature now allows users to scroll through short video clips accompanied with curated music paired to the video feed. This does sound a lot like Spotify’s Canvas feature which played short video clips for certain songs.

Again, this feature is only available on iOS devices. It is also not a fully released feature, which also means you must source for Beta versions of the Spotify app. Sadly if you are on Android, you might be out of luck.

Spotify, You One-Stop-Shop for All Your Netflix Soundtracks, Playlists, and Podcasts

In a world where experts thought, just a few years ago, that TV would be dead and short form content platforms like YouTube will takeover, TV and films are doing better than ever. You cannot credit their strength to manufacturers though. Rather, these things come because of technologies that exists and allows the existence of Netflix.

Netflix is now bigger than life though. While there are other platforms like Disney+, or Amazon Prime Videos, Netflix is still king. It is the one platform that you go to time and time again to find contents to watch. It is, at least personally, the first platform that we switch on to find entertainment before even YouTube.

You can never get enough of Netflix though. After every show, you might discover something about the show that you liked. The most common of that is the soundtracks used in the show or movie. Within two weeks of Squid Game’s debut on Netflix, 22,500 unique Squid Game themed playlists were created by Spotify users to keep the show alive.

Netflix very much understands that their users are looking for entertainment far beyond their own scope. Spotify sees this too, obviously, being the largest audio streaming platform known to man. A collaboration was imminent.

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Source: Spotify

They call it the Netflix Hub on Spotify and it is the best way for you to experience your Netflix shows beyond the streaming platform, at least according to Spotify and Netflix. In the hub premium users can find all official soundtracks, playlists, and even podcasts from Netflix’s shows. You can easily access soundtracks from shows like Squid Game, Bruised, and even Cowboy Bebop.

The collaboration is more than just compiling soundtracks, playlists, and podcasts though. In honor of the final season of Money Heist, Spotify has included new videos from the cast of the show (not available in Malaysia yet, as far as we can tell). They have also updated the soundtrack playlist with songs used the latest episodes of the show. There are also new features like Character Match Playlist quiz that matches you to your favourite characters from the Spanish show.

Of course, the collaboration will not just end at Money Heist. As Netflix populates its library with new contents, so will Spotify with dedicated Netflix contents. You might see a Squid Game related video content and quiz in the future, you will never know.

Now you can Easily Block Other People on Spotify

Today’s generation is the most connected one so far. But it is a generation also where cutting off someone is as easy as a click of a button. There is something called ‘cancel culture’ in the world of social media today.

While there are plenty of reasons why you would want to cut a person off, for whatever reasons, on social media, wanting to block a person on streaming platform like Spotify is a little odd. There is a way to block certain artists from ever appearing on your Spotify home feed. That feature was introduced back in 2019. For whatever reason as well, users have been wanting to block other users instead on the platform.

To be fair, Spotify is more than just a music streaming app today. It is also a social platform where you can add friends, follow their playlists and even see what they are playing in real time. In a sense, if someone is in your friends list, their listening privacy is gone. You can ensure that your listening session does not appear on any of your friends feed by turning on ‘Private Session’, but that only lasts for a limited time before Spotify kicks you back into online mode to update your songs and your recommendations.

You now can decide to block other users from accessing your activities now though. It is as simple as clicking the person’s profile and tap the “Block User” option. Once you have done that, the person will not be able to see you appearing on their ‘friend’s activity’ list on the right side of the app anymore, at least on the desktop interface. That way, you also limit what you show the person you blocked.

While showing your Spotify activity may not seem all that harmful, it could lead to a bigger impact. Some might think that just showing the ‘Now Listening to’ information as an empty information your friends cannot use. For example, other users can use the activity information from Spotify to harass you on other platforms like Facebook or Instagram, for example. They could also use whatever information they can gather against you as well for that matter. Remember, information in the wrong hands can be dangerous.

The function should be available to users very soon, at least according to Spotify as per Engadget.

Spotify Launches Blend for You to Share Playlists and Compare Musical Tastes

Sharing your playlist with your friends in the old days means that you have to copy a whole music library you have created over a USB drive, or a CD. That was the days before content streaming services like Spotify came to be. Even when Apple’s iTunes was a thing, it served more like a digital music library that requires you to have the music files stored in your device.

Before the days of Spotify too, you still had to pay money for individual songs and albums if you want to legally listen to them and own them for your own personal consumption or even share it with your friends. Obviously, sharing your music library before then is still a grey area in terms of copyright.

Spotify may not be the first music streaming service and cloud-based music library to exist. It is, in 2021 at least, the most successful thus far. This is amidst the rise in other services like Deezer, Tidal, YouTube Music, and more. If you think about it, Spotify has a tough competition to work with especially in Tidal and YouTube Music at this point. Tidal features a higher quality music streaming that allows music to play at near lossless quality while YouTube Music offers a more robust and complete music library compared to Spotify. At some point Taylor Swift criticised Spotify’s royalty structure and pulled all her assets away from Spotify.

SPOTIFYBLEND 1
Source: Spotify

When spotify launched, sharing your favourite songs and curated playlists is made super easy. You only need to share a URL with your friends now and you can listen to it at anytime where you have internet or data. Of course, your friends can still comment on your music selection and judge your music taste according to what you have just shared. You could also say sometimes that you share the same music taste with your best friends, but you would not really know how similar sometimes.

Spotify introduced Blend Playlists in June 2021 as a Beta feature. It was introduced as a way for two users to create a shared playlist that is dedicated to their shared musical tastes. It is also created as a new way for friends to interact and bond over their love of music.

The feature is now out in full force on your Spotify. Blend Playlists also now allows you to customise the playlist with unique cover arts for easy identification. The Blend feature also scores your music taste compatibility with your friends. Of course, you can share those on social media to brag that you and your besties are very similar to one another.

SPOTIFYBLEND 3
Source: Spotify

Blend is not a personally curated list though. It is still a curated list, but it is curated via Spotify’s clever mechanism that adds and changes the playlist to adapt to your listening behaviour combined with your friend’s listening behaviour that you share the list with. The best part is that both you and your friend can have a similar playlist experience but in completely different situations and locations at the same time.

Of course, this experience is not just limited to you and your best friends. It is a good way to start sharing a curated playlist with your family members, or a loved one. This is a way to keep your bonds as strong as they are in these trying times where face time and physical interaction has to be limited.

The feature should now be available on the Spotify app. You can supposedly access the feature from the “Made for you” hub on mobile devices. You simply hit “create blend” and invite your friends to create a Blend Playlist with whichever friends you choose to have a blend with (if the person accepts) and let Spotify do everything for you there. To our knowledge, we have found that the feature has not been made available to us (could just be us). The Spotify app is available for free on both Android and iOS via Google Play Store and Apple Play Store respectively.

Spotify Will Support Apple’s AirPlay 2, Eventually

Apple’s AirPlay function is one of the best things to have in the IoT focused world today. The system allows your Apple devices to connect to anything wireless in your home with AirPlay support and allow you to stream anything from any of your Apple devices in your home to the AirPlay supported devices.

Apple’s AirPlay 2 comes with added functionalities too. One of them really makes Apple’s ecosystem one of the most seamless in the world, if not the most seamless. It added streaming over WiFi function, which also means you get to play a single audio, from anywhere in your house, to your entire house, as long as you have speakers with AirPlay 2 enabled. It also allows you to choose between left and right speakers on enabled speakers, especially if you choose to use those speakers as your TV speakers.

We are not going to elaborate on the kinds of things you can do with AirPlay 2 though, because it has been launched for a while and you would have known its benefits by now, especially if you are coming from the iOS ecosystem. If you still do not know how to work with AirPlay 2 and the benefits of the system, get learning.

While AirPlay 2 has been Apple’s standard for three years now, it does not automatically become an industry standard. Not all smart TVs in the market gets AirPlay 2 support. Some of them could be hardware limited too though, so there is nearly nothing you can do about that. The big surprise is from app developers instead. For example, Spotify has not been supporting AirPlay 2.

A few days ago, there was an apparent posting in Spotify’s community forum that mentions that Apple’s AirPlay 2 support will not be coming to Spotify “for now”. This is in response to the numerous requests from Spotify’s iOS users in adding its support to the app. Of course, that might not have gone too well with users.

Spotify has since then clarified to the statement. Spotify says that they are still working on AirPlay 2 support on the app. In the clarification also Spotify did shed some light on why their app has not supported the function and why users may not see its support coming too soon.

https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/1423744958541058052

The developer that clarified the issue reveals that including AirPlay 2 support on the app is more complex than just adding a provided API to the current app and just let it work its own magic. There are a bunch of new commands that has to be written into the app. While adding a bunch of new command lines may not be the most complex thing for engineers to work with, Spotify says that the API, or at least Apple’s documentation on the API is a big stumbling block for its developers. In that case, developers might have to do a lot of guess work, and experiments to get the API to function without entirely messing itself up.

Spotify, with the new clarification, has not set a timeline for AirPlay 2 support though. While they did say that they are working on it and is assuring users that it is coming, there are no confirmations as to when. Still, at least you know it is coming, unless Apple comes back with AirPlay 3 this year.

Source: The Verge, Engadget

Spotify Beta App Released with M1 Native Support

Apple’s M1 chip for their Mac platform has been around for nearly eight months now. At the same time, while there is a growth for apps that natively supports the M1 chip, it has been a little slow in adoption from major app developers. At least there is some good news today though.

There are a few reasons why app developers want to develop apps that natively supports the M1 chip. Due to the unique architecture of Apple’s silicon, apps need to behave a little differently to take advantage of the chip’s power. In some sense, apps for the Mac have to be developed to work very much like mobile apps, but more feature rich than one.

This means that regular apps you usually see for your PC and regular Intel or AMD powered Mac, while runs on an M1 variant Mac, will run a little slower with more noticeable lags. This is also something you will see on regular PC apps running on other ARM based chips like the Qualcomm Compute platform. To ensure that the apps behave as they are designed to, they have to reengineer their apps a little bit to optimise its running processes for the ARM architecture-based chips.

Today is one of those days that another major app developer jumps on board of the M1 train. Spotify has just released a new Beta app with native support for Apple’s M1 silicon. For Spotify users currently on M1 Macs, that should mean a major improvement in the apps experience on their Macs.

To be fair, the Beta release should not come as a huge surprise. Users have been asking Spotify to release an M1 supported Spotify app since the M1 chips launched into the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, and iMac. The native support should mean that the app runs a lot smoother and faster, on top of being a little bit more stable on M1 chips.

It is still in Beta though, which also means that you can expect some hiccups from time to time. In that case, you might want to report all sorts of bugs you will encounter in your experience so that Spotify can rectify as much as possible before the app goes full prime time. According to their own Spotify community post, they would also like to hear from users if their app works nicely.

You can download the Spotify Beta version for M1 based Mac devices on their website. Their community page post also features some instructions on how to get the Beta app up and running. You can easily go back to the regular version too, if you are not too keen with the Beta app by simply downloading the app from their website regularly.

Spotify Buys Podz – Finding Your Favourite Podcasts Will be A Lot Easier

Spotify is already the world’s most popular music streaming app. The platform probably also houses the largest collection of podcasts known in the modern world. In some sense, in the world of audio streaming at least, Spotify arguably has the best interface and discovery Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Looking for music and discovering music that would suit your preferences is a breeze on Spotify. Spotify itself will surface music that suits your tastes based on your playlists, and even based on songs that you frequently listen to. Podcasts is a different story though.

It is not exactly difficult to find podcasts in Spotify. We would not call the podcast discovery function excellent either. We think that they might as well be non-existent sometimes. That is about to change though.

Spotify is acquiring Podz, a podcast discovery service. It uses AI to generate highlights for a particular podcast and let users listen to 60-second samples of a chow or podcast before listening to the full show or subscribing to a channel or show. In some ways, it allows you to evaluate the podcast even before you spend your precious time on it.

With the acquisition, Spotify will be looking to integrate Podz’s clever AI algorithm and working into Spotify itself. The integration will make it not just easier and less time consuming for users to evaluate shows before committing to the show. It will also allow Spotify to improve the discovery algorithm of their podcast platform with the highlights.

At the same time, as a user, it will really make Spotify’s library of 2.6 million podcasts much easier to navigate and a lot more interesting. Spotify has been continuously building their podcast platform over the years, even getting some podcast exclusives up and running in the past two years. With Podz integrated, they could surface and push their own exclusive podcasts on users’ landing page in their app or web player. If the service is successful also, it could attract more creators into the platform just because their contents will be a lot more visible than before.

Spotify is planning to integrate Podz into Spotify before the end of 2021. Of course, that also includes the roll out to users all around the world. Last week, Spotify has also launched their Clubhouse competitor, Greenroom. Greenroom is now available for free on both iOS and Android. With the integration of Podz and Greenroom, Spotify looks to be the world’s largest audio streaming solution.