Spotify rolled out a new vertical scrolling feed on Wednesday that’s reminiscent of TikTok. It shows video previews of recommended music, podcasts and audiobooks – and they automatically play out as you scroll.
It’s a major redesign that Spotify says is meant to lean more heavily into recommendations, rather than keeping users on the platform for longer. Among the other new features is ‘Smart Shuffle’, which temporarily adds songs to your playlists and ‘DJ’, an artificial intelligence tool that selects tracks it thinks you’ll like based on your app usage data.
The New Home Feed
Spotify is rolling out a new vertical scrolling feed that’s more like TikTok than your usual list of album covers. It’s the largest update for the platform since it was launched on phones over a decade ago, according to its CEO Daniel Ek.
The new feed includes video and audio previews for music, podcasts, and audiobooks, executives said at Spotify’s Stream On event on Wednesday. The feature is designed to make it easier for users to find and sample new content within the app.
The home feeds also include personalized recommendations, so listeners will have a more focused experience as they browse. They’ll see albums and playlists based on their tastes, and buttons that make it easy to share or save to your favorites.
Audio Previews
At its Stream On event on Wednesday, Spotify announced the rollout of a vertical scrolling feed that will integrate music, podcasts and audiobooks. The company says that the new feature will give users video previews of playlists, albums, podcast episodes and audiobooks that they can scroll through.
Spotify said that the new feature will be available to Premium and Free users globally across iOS and Android. The platform added that it was the first platform to enable truly seamless previews of all three services — music, podcasts and audiobooks.
The vertical scrolling feed will be present on the Home page as well as in the Music, Podcasts & Shows and Audiobooks sections. This will include short Canvas clips from artists’ tracks that Spotify says are already successful in increasing streams, shares and saves.
These visual previews will also appear in curated playlists like Discover Weekly, Release Radar, New Music Friday and Rap Caviar. The company believes that these video clips will help users find their next favourite song or artist.
Personalized Recommendations
Spotify has a robust algorithm that suggests content to its users based on their listening history, music choices, and duration of play for certain songs. This enables Spotify to personalize recommendations to a user, ensuring that they get the most relevant suggestions.
However, personalized recommendations can often over-index on music that doesn’t fit with a user’s general listening habits. This is why Spotify is now introducing a new feature called “Exclude from your Taste Profile.”
The new feature will let you tell Spotify which playlists you’d like to impact less on your recommendations, to allow for a more tailored personalization experience.
The company is also testing a new feature that will give artists and labels more control over how their songs are recommended. It will give them a chance to select which tracks they’d like to be prioritized in personalized listening sessions on Radio and Autoplay. Then, if the track resonates with listeners, they’ll keep trying it in similar sessions. But if they don’t, they’ll be removed from those sessions.
Smart Shuffle
Spotify is rolling out a vertical scrolling feed for songs and artists similar to the format popularized by TikTok. The feed will show you preview video clips as you scroll through search results and certain playlists, like Discover Weekly and New Music Friday.
In addition to this, the platform is adding a ‘Smart Shuffle’ option that will temporarily add tracks to your existing playlists. The feature will then use your likes and dislikes to improve the suggestions it puts forward.
Another change focused on discovery is a new ‘audio newsfeed’ that will give you 60-second audio previews of podcast episodes in a vertically scrolling feed. This will be based on technology acquired from Podz last year.
Similarly, the company has also launched new personalized discovery feeds for things like genres and moods. These will appear on the music, podcast and audiobook pages. These will include personalised recommendations with automatically generated previews, according to Spotify.