Spotify’s social-audio app is expected to shut down at the end of April. Photo Credit: Bastian Riccardi
A little less than one year after rebranding Greenroom as Spotify Live, the namesake streaming platform is officially shutting down the Clubhouse clone amid a broader effort to dial back its audio-entertainment overexpansion.
The discontinuation of Spotify Live just recently came to light in a brief message posted on the app’s homepage. Back in March of 2021, Spotify purchased Locker Room, an audio-driven social platform and (at the time) leading competitor of the aforesaid Clubhouse.
Locker Room was then relaunched as Greenroom (with several new features) that summer, and user-download stats revealed shortly thereafter that the app was having difficulty catching on. Needless to say, the initially highlighted rebranding failed to turn things around for the live-audio offering, which in September of 2022 canceled a Ghost event due to “technical difficulties” stemming from “overwhelming” fan demand.
(Clubhouse has reportedly suffered a material usership decline since peaking in early 2021, and Meta’s Facebook in June of 2022 went ahead and shuttered its podcast offering, which had only debuted in 2021.)
More recently, Spotify – which previously dropped billions on podcasts, other spoken-word entertainment, and related businesses – has set its sights on reining in spending. Even before kicking off 2023 by trimming six percent of its workforce, the publicly traded business in 2022 closed Studio 4, axed a number of podcast series, and, during the year’s final weeks, ended several live-audio shows.
And with the non-music restructuring having showed few signs of slowing down during 2023’s first three months, Spotify Live is officially expected to cease operating on April 30th.
“Spotify Live is going away,” reads a message displayed on the service’s homepage. “The Spotify Live app will shut down on April 30, 2023. You can still join any rooms or artist events until then. We’re excited to bring more live events to Spotify in the future. Stay tuned!”
In a statement, a company spokesperson expanded upon the latter point, indicating that the platform will host other live happenings in the future – albeit without the Spotify Live app, of course.
“After a period of experimentation and learnings around how Spotify users interact with live audio, we’ve made the decision to sunset our Spotify Live app,” communicated the representative, whose employer hosted a real-time DJ set from Swedish House Mafia last year.
“While we believe that there is a future for live fan-creator interactions in the Spotify ecosystem, based on our learnings, it no longer makes sense as a separate, standalone app,” the rep proceeded. “We’ve also seen promising results in the artist-focused use case of listening parties, which we will continue to explore moving forward to facilitate live interactions between artists and fans.”
Notwithstanding the above-noted podcasting cutbacks, Spotify is currently expanding video podcasts. When the market closed today, the ValueAct Capital-backed company’s shares (NYSE: SPOT) were worth $136.44 apiece – a nearly 67 percent improvement since 2023’s beginning.