The Next Generation of Spotify

Spotify are increasing the heat with a roll out of their biggest upgrade yet; so jam packed with social features they’ll be spilling out your headphones. Spotify version 0.4.3 was launched officially on Tuesday, but users may have to wait a while before they get the upgrade out to everybody, my guess is that premium users will get priority! For those not yet initiated into free music heaven this added social element may be the driver to encourage new sign ups. For Spotify users who have not yet received the upgrade you can look forward to facebook integration, personal profiles and track sharing from a social point of view; combined with playlist updates, track replacement and local file linking from your own music database, plus loads more features to enhance your music experience.
A selection of the new features can be seen in the official promotional video on the Spotify blog, and include:

• Facebook Integration: importing contacts, posting information such as favourite songs, recieving a feed on friends posted music from Facebook
• Inbox and Track sharing: you can recieve and send tracks to friends through an ‘inbox’ feature
• Public Profiles: including information such as favourite tracks / artists, playlists for your friends to subscribe to and the ability to link your profile to other social networks such as blogs, facebook etc.
• Music management: you can combine your own music library with Spotify, plus they’re introducing a track replacement feature that finds replacement tracks if a friend in another country sends you one you can’t stream

But features aside, what I’m more interested in is how this new social Spotify is going to fit into and change the social media space, and where it’s going to go after there.

Will it take off?

Spotify’s SVP of Strategic Partnerships Paul Brown says “We are not a social network and we do not want to become a social network.” Which is probably a good thing seen as Spotify’s current customer base of 7 million pails into insignificance against Facebook’s 400 million global users.  But Spotify are taking social networking to a new level. By using an existing, already hugely popular platform they are not competing directly for new consumers, rather adding value to what consumers have already got. This strategy should serve them well; as it requires no extra effort on the part of the consumer (all the information needed is already contained within their facebook profile). Therefore, this upgrade should simply lead to increased loyalty and frequency of use from existing customers, as well as enticing new customers to the platform who want extra features that Facebook cannot accommodate.

Although Spotify is still an exclusive service, requiring an invite to become a member I think this upgrade will spark a lot of interest from consumers not yet using it. The nature of the social features means that current users will talk about it more, either verbally, via blogs or digitally sub-consciously through their facebook profile updates etc. Currently Spotify only has 7m users but there are rumours of it’s launch in the US this year, which will boost that figure considerably and put Spotify on the world stage.

Ultimately, this platform is aiming to become a user’s main desktop music player. It can replace iTunes, as people can link their music library to Spotify, creating a ‘super library’ of their music, their friends music (via playlists) and Spotify’s extensive selection of tunes.
The promotional video looks pretty good, and the ease of sharing tracks with your friends (without having to search for it on YouTube)  combined with playlist subscription and being able to have a good old nosey at everyones top tracks and artists means my prediction is a big thumbs up for Music that’s ‘social, local, connected’. Essentially, they’ve taken everything that people like to do in the digital social domain and combined it into their programme. Instead of listening to a song through iTunes, then searching for it on Youtube so you can post a link on your friends wall via Facebook, users can do it all with less than 5 clicks on Spotify!

What’s in store in the future?

I believe in Browns notion, that they “don’t want to be a social network”.  What is interesting to note however is how Spotify’s integration with Facebook highlights the dominance of this social network over all others. MySpace, once the social network of choice for all now caters for the niche music market, it is well renowned for being the hub of undiscovered musical talent. So by choosing to integrate Facebook profiles over MySpace Spotify have provided yet another barrier to the MySpace survival plan. What Spotify are doing is very clever; rather than competing with the big boys in the social media space they’ve engaged and used the dominance and popularity of social networks to propel their platform into the consumer’s digital space. Rather than floundering or following the herd they’ve taken this new phenomenon and done something useful with it. Furthermore, with new data being captured such as popularity of songs and top tracks or artists of a particular user, combined with the importation or production of personal profiles, I reckon it’s a safe bet that it’s only a matter of time before advertisers want to personally target their ads to the free members that use Spotify on the basis of receiving ads with it. It won’t be long before Spotify replace Twitter in the news about renewing its business model, in order to make more money from advertisers looking to reach the ever elusive generation X.