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Video coming to Spotify this week
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 26 January 2016
In an attempt to stop people constantly asking “when exactly are you going to launch all that stuff you announced last May in a bid to pre-empt Apple Music”, Spotify will apparently launch one of the things it announced last May in a bid to pre-empt Apple Music this very week. That’s right you guys, video is coming to the streaming service. And just in time for February!
According to the Wall Street Journal, Android users this week, followed by iOS addicts next week, will be able to tap their Spotify apps for some video good times. Though only in the US, UK, Germany and Sweden. Because Spotify famously hates Norwegians. And everyone who isn’t American, British, German or Swedish. But mainly Norwegians.
The company has actually been testing the video function with a small proportion of its users for several months now. With mainly short videos to share, it has apparently found that the best way to deliver them is in small packages with titles like ‘News Of The Week’ and ‘Laughs At Lunch’. So a bit like the in-house audio playlists it already offers.
“We are at the end of a journey of testing”, VP Product Shiva Rajaraman told the WSJ. “We are going out effectively as planned. Our goal was largely to get a wide breadth of content and experiment and test”.
Rajaraman admitted that convincing Spotify users to sit and look at an app they usually have running in the background could be an uphill struggle. “Obviously our primary user is a music fan”, he said. “And they are not necessarily leaning in and looking into the app. So there are no particular recipes for how to get this right”.
Which basically means it’s taken Team Spotify almost nine months to launch this thing, it’s not really changed in that time, and they don’t know how or if it’s going to work. Great stuff.
