This topic will be use to discuss Spotify features and tools.
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Spotify released a series of podcast tools and features including;
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Customization feature that enables podcasters to personalize parts of their pages for the first time.
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Impression analytics that will enable creators to know how their podcasts are being discovered.
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Spotify Audience Network Performance Dashboard for Megaphone enterprise publishers will display metrics such as CPMs and impressions delivered by each podcast.
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Spotify starts testing whether to make the in-app lyrics feature a premium feature.
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Users have started noticing the lyrics locked away under a paywall that says, “Enjoy lyrics on Spotify Premium.”
“At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests, some of those tests end up paving the way for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning,” Spotify co-head of global communications, CJ Stanley said.
“In keeping with our standard practices, we’re currently testing this with a limited number of users in a pair of markets." he said in a follow up statement.
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Spotify CFO, Paul Vogel, said during Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference that AI DJ has been one of their most successful products.
“Reviews have been amazing, and it’s something that’s very differentiated, that consumers love, that the artists love because it’s getting the content out there, and so we’re going to continue to invest in those types of things," he said.
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On podcasting, he said that they are the largest player in many countries they participate in and that they feel good about their market share and growth.
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He added that Spotify originals will continue to be part of their strategy.
“We continue to believe that creating podcasts and having Spotify originals will still be a part of the strategy. We’re also going to think about what’s the best way to produce that content with the business partner with that content. What’s the best way to share in the risk and the reward of that content with our partners?”he said.
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- Spotify adds Daylist, a new feature that evolves throughout the day with new tracks and titles to reflect your moods, to its personalized playlists.
- For instance, if you listen to happy and upbeat music on certain mornings, you might get a suggestion like 'happy dance."
- Daylist comes with an in-built sharing feature that has ready-made screenshot, personalized sticker, or customizable sharecard.
- The new feature will initially be available to both free and premium users in English-speaking countries such as U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland.
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- Spotify launched Showcase, a music marketing tool that enables artists to promote new and previous realeases to their chosen listeners at the right time.
- Spotify said people who see Showcase are 6x more likely to stream the promoted music.
- The tool helps you reach listeners in more than 30 markets including countries in Europe, South America, North America and Oceania.
- Showcase will provide you with user engagement data after 24 hours of using it.
- Its budget start at $100 when booked using Spotify for Artists and will run for 14 days after your compaign starts or until the budget is spent.
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According to a code found in the Spotify app by a Reddit user, Spotify could be getting closer to launching the long-awaited HiFi.
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The HiFi would come in the form of the “Supremium” tier and could include the ability to create playlists with AI.
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Additionally, the tier will feature 30 hours of audiobook listening per month, according to the Redditor.
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The tier will also feature other music mixing tools such as customization tools and tools for filtering songs by mood and genre.
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The Redditor also discovered that the price listed for “Supremium” tier is $19.99 per month though this could just be a placeholder.
“At Spotify, we are constantly iterating and ideating to improve our product offering and offer value to users,” Spotify spokesperson CJ Stanley told The Verge. “But we don’t comment on speculation around possible new features and do not have anything new to share at this time.”
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- Spotify is testing Voice Translation for podcasts, a feature that translates podcasts into local languages and which uses AI to mimic podcaster’s voice.
- The company said it has worked with podcasters Dax Shepard, Monica Padman, Lex Fridman, Bill Simmons, and Steven Bartlett to come up with AI-powered voice translations in other languages such as Spanish, French, and German for some current and future podcast episodes.
- Spotify said that voice translations for Dax Shepard’s eff won with DRS, The Rewatchables from The Ringer, and Trevor Noah’s upcoming original podcast will soon be generated.
- The translated episodes will be available to both free and premium users.
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Daniel EK, Spotify CEO said the company will not completely ban content generated using AI.
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He said AI could be used to improve music, mimic artist and create content that are influenced by existing artists but doesn’t directly impersonate them.
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EK said the industry is facing a big challenge when it comes to AI.
“You can imagine someone uploading a song, claiming to be Madonna, even if they’re not. We’ve seen pretty much everything in the history of Spotify at this point with people trying to game our system,” Ek said. “We have a very large team that is working on exactly these types of issues.”
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- Spotify launches Jam, a new personalized tool for creating playlists by group of people in real-time.
- Jam enables premium subscribers to invite other Spotify users to contribute music through a shared queue.
- Anyone who is on the shared Wi-Fi can contribute to the Jam but premium listeners can join anywhere, whether in the same room or across the world.
- It builds on technology used in Collaborative Playlists and Blend, that makes music sharing easier.
- Spotify said more than 45 million Blends have been created and last month alone, users spent over 200 million hours listening to Collaborative Playlists.
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- Spotify introduces auto-generated time-synced transcripts to more podcast creators and shows.
- The company said it will rollout these transcripts to millions of episodes in the coming weeks.
- Additionally, Spotify wants to enable creators to add media to these transcripts in future.
- Spotify is also expanding podcast chapters to mobile users, giving them more information about the episode they plan to listen to.
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- Spotify said Premium subscribers will now have access to more than 150,000 audiobooks.
- As a start, Premium Individual, Family and Duo accounts will have 15 hours of audiobooks listening time per month.
- The feature will be rolled out today in the U.K. and Australia while U.S premium users will have access to it before the end of the year.
- Users who deplete their 15 hours listening time before the month ends can purchase additional 10 hours to finish their series.
- Spotify added that Premium users can also download the audiobooks for offline listening.
- The Wall Street Journal had reported last month that Spotify was testing this feature and that it could offer up to 20 hours of free audiobooks per month.
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Evercore ISI praised the audiobooks offering saying it’s a a “very differentiating product offering,” that should “drive greater user engagement, retention and payer conversion.”
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Evercore analysts said the offering is likely baked into the management’s 2023 gross margin outlook but future earnings should benefit from it.
On a standalone basis, we expect Audiobook to generate higher gross margin than the current music business for Spotify,” analysts including Mark Mahaney wrote.
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Mahaney team also pointed out that the offering gives Spotify greater pricing power due to more robust value proposition, a statement echoed by Morgan Stanley.
“By building more value into its audio service for users, including further differentiating it from the competition, Spotify should see lower churn and increased pricing power, ” analysts Benjamin Swinburne and Cameron Mansson-Perrone wrote.
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Benchmark analyst see the offering as a way to superpremium subscription model.
“Spotify’s long game is to lead the market with Netflix-like annual pricing increases and the only way this is accomplished is with a fully-loaded subscription offering; now 100M music tracks, 5M podcasts, and 150,000 audiobooks,” Mark Zgutowicz wrote.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4018288-spotify-audiobook-offering-garners-kudos-analysts
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- Spotify revamps artists profile page into Music, Concerts, and Merch.
- The Music tap can be used by artists to crowdsource funds, showcase top tracks as well as important things such as upcoming events, give a 1,500 words bio about themselves and add Clips - 30-second short-form videos that enable artists to tell their stories.
- The Events tap enable fans to purchase tickets to a forthcoming event or tap “interested” to receive updates on new events.
- Merch enable fans to browse and purchase up to 12 artist’s available merch linked from Shopify.
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Hashtag founder Chris Messina also uncovered the “Superpremium” offering.
Good to see that Spotify has a good cadence of releasing new useful products. I think Event and Merch tabs are useful to increase artists reliance on Spotify and allow them to monetize better, while Spotify might be able to secure a share of those additional revenues.
That’s in line with Spotifies new functionality to allow artists to advertise their music and highlights a new artist focused revenue vertical for Spotify.
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Redburn Atlantic downgraded Spotify to neutral from buy and lowered its price target to $160 from $170 following the firm’s decision to offer audiobooks to its premium subscribers.
- Analyst Agnieszka Pustula said the move may lower Spotify’s margin by 200 basis points since the company will spend around €80 million in audiobooks royalties for the UK and Australia market launch and additional €180 million for the U.S market, and that new subscribers would generate negative gross margins.
- Pustula also thinks Amazon, its competitor in Audiobooks market, may respond by bundling up its audiobooks feature with Amazon Music; hence reducing Spotify’s competitive advantage and pricing power.
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- In an effort to gain more paid users, Spotify is putting restrictions on its free tier feature in India.
- The restrictions include the inability to play songs in a manual order, rewind, and repeat songs.
- The new free tier is now almost similar to the one offered in Brazil.
- According to Spotify, India is one of the top five countries in terms of monthly active users, but doesn’t fall into the top five category in terms of paid subscribers.
I think free tier programs in countries like India are likely a drag to profitability in the moment as ad-support cannot compensate the streaming costs. On the other side it is one of the fastest growing regions and an important market to capture in the long term.
Limitation like those above might be a way for Spotify to both reduce costs as well as increase revenues and get valuable conversion metric insights.
Yeah, if the initiative works, they could replicate it in other regions.