Spotify India Launches In-App Rewards Program – How It Works

Spotify India rewards program

Photo Credit: Szymon Kopeć

Spotify is testing a new feature for its pay-as-you-go plans in India, dubbed Premium Mini. Here’s how it works.

Spotify Premium Mini service provides access to the service for a day for seven rupees ($0.085) or a week for 25 rupees ($0.30). The experiment offers Premium Mini users a discount and other benefits based on their usage of the Spotify app. Spotify Senior Product Manager Szymon Kopeć says the new feature has been built with Asia in mind to incentivize app use. 

Premium Mini users who use the service for 10 days in a 30-day period can get a week of the service for two rupees rather than the usual 25 rupee price. Asian countries like India, Korea, Japan, and China all respond to the gamification of apps thanks to the prevalence of gacha mechanics in eastern video games. Gamification of platforms helps increase engagement because users are enticed to use the app every single day to earn their reward. 

Music streaming services already use gamification in their algorithms to keep people listening to music. Consistency, variation, surprise, and delight are all concepts music algorithms can deliver to keep humans listening. Spotify uses fixed interval schedules like playlists that change daily to cataloging your top songs over the last year. These create incentives over various time periods that are aimed at keeping a user engaged.

Random and fixed rewards are also part of the gamification of platforms like Spotify. Fixed rewards show up in the Discover Weekly playlist for each user. Spotify’s algorithm can predict you may like the songs–but not guarantee it. Every play of the list is a gamble the listener takes–will you like this next song? But it’s a fixed place to make that gamble and one users who like the experience of finding new songs this way will return to time and time again.

Random rewards for users like 30 minutes of ad-free listening are a way to give users a taste of paid service. See how nice it is not to be interrupted by ads? This new Premium Mini in-app feature falls under the fixed reward category–use the app for 10 days and earn a week more of use for a 90% discount. 

 

 

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