In its bid to be more than just a music app, Spotify has pushed a radical new design of its core home screen. The design focuses heavily on images and vertical-scrolling videos in addition to features like Storyline and Spotify Clips, the latter allowing artists to upload 30-second videos to their artist profiles essentially creating its own stories feature.
The new interface is intended to turn the Spotify home page into more of a feed that helps users discover new artists and content across Spotify. The app also demonstrated a new suite of tools to help artists find the right target audience as well as new features aimed at creating hype around their content, merchandise and live events.
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A design aimed at pushing new types of content
Spotify’s new redesign seems to be a mix of Youtube, Instagram and TikTok all at the same time as the app tries to make more space for different new kinds of content on the home screen. As users open the redesigned app, they’re greeted with albums and playlist covers at the top. Underneath, there can be a video podcast that auto-plays by default or the aforementioned Storyline feature that aims to tell you more about a particular playlist or creator.
Tapping on the Music or Podcasts & Shows section takes users to a vertically scrolling feed resembling Instagram and TikTok in terms of the vertically designed content. Users can scroll through different albums, playlists, creators and content types among other things and tap anything that they’re interested in for a deeper dive.
Overall, there’s far more auto-playing content in the app now in addition to multiple ways to quickly preview songs and artists without fully investing in a track and jumping into the player. Additionally, there are more personalised AI features, including Smart Shuffle which temporarily adds tracks to existing playlists and DJ.
Discovery tools launched to help artists grow
In addition to the new redesign, Spotify also announced three new tools for artists to find the right target audience and grow on the platform. These tools include a feature called ‘Marquee’ — a full-screen, sponsored recommendation of a new release. According to the company, a Marquee is 10 times more cost-effective on average when it comes to getting listeners to a track or album as compared to ads on most social media platforms.
Next up there’s a new discovery mode tool allowing artists (and their teams) to select songs they want to prioritise on the platform. Once a song has been flagged, Spotify will then add that song to personalised listening algorithms increasing the chances of a song resonating with the listener both in the autoplay and radio listening modes. Additionally, artists will also get monthly reports to show new listener growth.
Finally, there’s ‘Showcase’ a new card on the redesigned home page that introduces a particular artist’s music to a likely listener. Spotify is currently testing this feature with select artists and labels and will make it more accessible in the future allowing artists to reach the right target audience.
However, that’s not all. The streaming service also announced new features and tools for concert and merch discovery with users seeing listings for both in multiple places across the app. Users can show their interest in live events and add them to their own calender in a separate “live events” feed. Users can also change their location to browser concerts and live events worldwide. That said, Spotify claims that concert recommendations are personalised to each user.
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