During its 90-minute Stream On presentation broadcast live from Los Angeles, Spotify announced major changes to its app design, including new vertical video feeds and a built-in pre-save button. Instead of a static carousel of playlists and recommendations, users will now be shown feeds of visual and audio previews of playlists, albums, podcast episodes, and audiobooks in an endless feed of vertical video. The previews are also integrated into the search function.
Additionally, a pre-save feature—long utilized by artists through various third-party apps to gather data and contact information on the people excited about their music—will now be baked directly into the Spotify app.
In a separate speech, at a conference hosted by Morgan Stanley, Spotify’s chief financial officer, Paul Vogel, praised the company’s six-percent reduction of its global workforce as a “a real positive,” suggesting the business had to “evolve.”
Just days earlier, SoundCloud announced it was testing a “TikTok-like” vertical video feed for music discovery. Like Spotify’s, it will serve up music based on your listening history and musical taste, but unlike the Swedes, SoundCloud will also display a line explaining the reason why a particular song is showing up in your recommendations.
Spotify also recent debuted the Beta launch of its personalized AI guide named DJ. DJ is available to premium users in the United States and Canada, and uses data about your listening habits to choose what to play.
Last year, Netflix shared The Playlist, a fictionalized show about Spotify, and launched a website that allows users to buy concert tickets directly on the platform, cutting out intermediaries like Ticketmaster.