Brace yourself: Spotify is following in the footsteps of every other social media company and pivoting to video. At the company’s annual Stream On event on Wednesday, it unveiled a new home feed that prominently displays video, in addition to snippets of songs, podcasts, and audiobooks.
The new feed start rolling out today, March 8, and will expand to more users in the coming weeks and months. Your Music and Podcast & Shows feeds will no longer be a series of album and podcast covers stacked next to each other. Instead, you’ll now see a vertical feed akin to TikTok and Instagram that plays previews of content alongside creator-made videos that occupy the entire screen. Spotify’s curated playlists like Discovery Weekly and Rap Caviar will also have previews and videos.
Credit: Spotify
Spotify’s update aims to help users find more content on the platform. The idea is that users will scroll through their feed and see fragments of content that they then will save for later. But these changes appear to miss the thing that people actually enjoy about the app: all the music they love being in one place.
Right now, people don’t open Spotify to see videos of their favorite artists, but the company seeks to change that. It wants to become a one-stop shop for content. These updates are another case of a social media platform trying to incorporate video-first content in way that may detract from the user experience.
The new feeds were announced at Spotify’s second Stream On event where it also unveiled an expansion of video podcasts – a type of podcast that currently thrives on YouTube – and a partnership with Patreon.
These updates come weeks after Spotify launched its AI DJ that serves to recommend music to users. It incorporates Spotify’s discovery playlists, so you don’t have to pick one on your own.
Spotify continues its mission to be the only place you listen to everything and anything.
