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Spotify rolls out new home screen, and dabbles in ticket pre-sales

By | Published on Wednesday 10 August 2022

Spotify

Spotify is rolling out a revamp to the home screen on its app which it says will make it easier to navigate content on the platform, mainly by more clearly separating out music from podcasts.

Spotify said in a post yesterday: “This week, we are launching a new Home experience that includes feeds for both Music and Podcasts & Shows. The feature is currently rolling out to Android users and will soon be available on iOS”.

“By creating these feeds”, it added, “Spotify will help listeners to easily scroll through the type of content they’re looking for at that moment. The updated interface will make the experience more personalised while allowing users to dig even deeper into their recommendations”.

“In the Music feed”, it went on, “listeners will have quick access to suggestions based on their music taste, making discovering new favourites easier than ever. There will also be album and playlist recommendations as well as buttons that make it easy to share, like, and instantly play music”.

And, it continued, “in the Podcast & Shows feed, listeners will be able to head straight to new episodes of their favourite shows. They’ll also find personalised podcast recommendations. What’s more, listeners will be able to read episode descriptions, save to Your Episodes or start playing podcasts without leaving the page, so the experience all starts from one place”.

Lovely stuff. Elsewhere in Spotify news, Music Ally yesterday reported that the streaming firm is piloting a new site that sees it directly selling tickets to a small number of gigs happening in the US. Although Spotify already pushes tickets for shows to its users based on what tracks they have been listening to, currently those tickets are actually being sold by ticketing firms with which the streaming outfit has partnerships.

Given all the user data Spotify sits on, and its ability to target shows at relevant fans, some have long mused that the streaming firm might more proactively move into ticketing one day. That said, primary ticketing is an incredibly challenging business to get into, with most artists and promoters allocating most of their tickets to a small number of established ticket agents.

Those ticket agents also sit on large amounts of user data that is live music specific – and which is getting more sophisticated now mobile ticketing is finally becoming the norm. Plus promoters often look to their ticketing partners to help with cash flow as well as marketing, which makes it harder for new entrants to launch in the marketplace.

And that’s before you take into account that the biggest live music company in the world, ie Live Nation, also owns the biggest ticketing company in the world, ie Ticketmaster.

Those challenges have proven too much for many ticketing start-ups to overcome, even when their products offered both a better experience for users and better data for promoters. And it’s not just start-ups who have struggled to take on the existing ticketing giants, after all, Amazon’s grand plans in ticketing didn’t come to much. But could Spotify overcome those challenges? Who knows?

Although, it’s worth noting, the new pilot has much more modest ambitions, being focused on a small number of pre-sale ticket offers for super-fans.

And the streaming firm is keen to stress that this is very much an experimental pilot, telling Music Ally: “At Spotify, we routinely test new products and ideas to improve our user experience. Some of those end up paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as important learnings. Tickets.spotify.com is our latest test. We have no further news to share on future plans at this time”.



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