Söderström said Spotify is investing in voice, but it didn’t have any news to share today. The company has been testing voice commands inside its mobile app, giving users a route to music that’s faster than thumbing out whatever it is they’re looking for. One thing Spotify didn’t discuss much today was voice. Spotify will now recommend similar sounding songs right underneath search to make “playlisting” easier.
“The mobile free tier has stayed exactly the same since 2014,” he said, adding that “discovering music in shuffle mode is a tricky proposition.” But that’s changing with this revamped experience. “Over the last several years, we've made Spotify’s premium mobile experience top notch,” Söderström said. The company’s goal is to keep free users satisfied and not have them feeling like second-class listeners.īut the company is aware that in recent years, it has prioritized monthly subscribers over free listeners. It’s where 60 percent of paid users start out. The freemium aspect is particular important Spotify has over 90 million free users. “Spotify is both the radio station and the record store,” he said.
Spotify R&D chief Gustav Söderström shows off the redesigned experience for free users.Īt the start of today’s event, Spotify’s chief R&D officer Gustav Söderström touted the three tentpoles that have brought Spotify success: ubiquity (availability across popular devices), personalization (Discover Weekly, etc.), and freemium. Spotify says it’s currently in the process of rolling out the redesigned app experience to everyone. The new Spotify also has a “data saver” mode that’s meant to make life easier for people on capped data usage plans. Spotify now has an immediate on boarding experience for free customers to tune the app and music recommendations to their taste.Īlso, Spotify will now ask free customers to choose their favorite artists as soon as they get started with the app, allowing the service to immediately provide personalized playlists tuned to their tastes. The updated app will help assist users with this “playlisting” process by suggesting songs that are similar to those they’ve already added right below the search bar. Spotify says users have created over 2 billion playlists.
Discover Weekly, Release Radar, and Daily Mix playlists are included, so it'll be nice to have more flexibility with those.
The 15 full-control playlists are generated by Spotify based on your listening habits and are constantly updated - most of them daily. Those aren't playlists you make yourself, however. You’ll have to deal with shuffle beyond those 15 playlists, but this is still a significant improvement over how things have been until now. Free listeners will now get on-demand access to 15 “select” playlists you can play any song you want inside those playlists and are no longer stuck in a world of shuffled playback. It’s the first major change to Spotify’s free tier since 2014, and visually it looks a lot like what The Verge reported earlier this month. At an event in New York City today, Spotify revealed a redesigned app experience for its 90 million free customers.