"Streaming" isn't "direct-to-fan": The problem with Spotify's new Stories for Playlists feature
Happy Sunday everyone!
I’m writing this from Mumbai, where I’ll be hanging for the next two weeks, in part for the All About Music conference. I’ll be sharing some music-related takeaways from my trip on this page in the coming days.
If you have any recommendations for people I should meet there and/or sights I should see, please feel free to message me directly or comment below! 🙂
——-
Now for today’s topic:
If you’re on Twitter and are interested in keeping up to date with the product roadmaps of the world’s biggest tech companies, someone whom you must follow is Jane Wong.
She’s a Hong Kong-based software developer who’s renowned for reverse-engineering and leaking upcoming app features from tech giants like Facebook, Instagram, Google and Twitter before they’re officially released to the public. Essentially, Wong outpaces many investigative tech journalists on product scoops simply by writing code.
In fact, you may already recognize Wong’s name because she’s been posting a lot of interesting scoops around unreleased Spotify features recently.
She was the first to break the news in May 2019 that Spotify was working on a “Social Listening” feature, allowing friends to control music together from their own devices via a shared queue; the scoop was shortly picked up by TechCrunch. Later, Jane also leaked the potential replacement of “follow” buttons with “like” buttons on Spotify playlists, as well as the ability to add a podcast episode to a personal playlist.
Today’s post focuses on a new scoop that Jane tweeted last week, namely that Spotify is working on “Stories for Playlists.”
Through this unreleased feature, playlists on Spotify can get their own Story-like format, in which previews of each track are stitched together with vertical video clips uploaded by the playlist owner.
For instance, on her blog, Jane included a recording of an unreleased Story for Norwegian singer-songwriter Sigrid‘s playlist “Don’t Feel Like Crying.” In between 30-second previews of each track on the playlist, there’s a super-brief video of Sigrid explaining her personal motivations behind including each song in the collection. (The “Don’t Feel Like Crying” playlist is already available on Spotify, by the way — sans Stories and with a different tracklist that hasn’t been updated since February.)
[Pictured above: Screenshot of Sigrid talking about the songs on her playlist “Don’t Feel Like Crying,” via the unreleased Stories for Playlists feature. Credit to Jane Wong.]
Stories for Playlists is a natural extension of several video- and context-driven features that Spotify has released over the past few years.
For instance, the streaming service’s “Storyline” feature, which was first revealed in May 2019, allows select artists to include a sequence of comments on their individual tracks, and is also structured in a Stories-like format.
In turn, the Storyline feature extended on Spotify’s “Behind the Lyrics” partnership with Genius, which features a rolling display of lyrics and annotations, and was developed to help provide the richer, artist-verified context behind songs that was (and still is) largely missing from Spotify’s user interface.
In terms of video, while Spotify has had a rocky journey with video over the past few years, the company seems to have settled on interstitial, vertical videos within playlists as their primary form of video content (see “RapCaviar: Visualize” for an example); the Stories for Playlists format is hypothetically just a different way of displaying that content in a single, visual sequence.
[Pictured above: Screenshot of “RapCaviar: Visualize,” a video-heavy playlist that features producers talking about their work. Taken by me.]
All of these features are a nod in the right direction, in terms of allowing artists to customize their presence on Spotify while sharing more elements of their personality and biography with listeners, instead of being relatively anonymous behind their songs in a playlist environment.
Nonetheless, there are four reasons why I’m still not convinced that this new Stories for Playlists feature is going to make a meaningful dent in how fan engagement works on Spotify, let alone in the wider music industry.
• • •
First of all, Spotify is an extreme laggard in adopting the Stories format, which has already been mainstreamed by incumbent social apps like Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat over the past six years. Even YouTube beat Spotify to the chase, and is still beta-testing the Stories feature that it launched on its mobile app in November 2017.
To be fair, there’s a reason why seemingly every major consumer-facing media company is adopting the Stories format: it’s growing at a much faster pace than other social formats. One report claims that Stories creation and consumption grew by over 800% between 2016 and 2018. At Facebook’s F8 conference in 2018, the company’s former chief product officer Chris Cox shared that Stories are “on a path to surpass feeds as the primary way people share things with their friends” sometime this year.
So, yes, there is market validation for Spotify creating a Stories-esque product, to align with behavior that already exists.
But the above media incumbents have also beaten Spotify to the punch in terms of incorporating music into stories in an interesting way.
Instagram already has integrations with Spotify, Deezer and Tidal that allow users of said streaming platforms to share screenshots of songs in Instagram Stories. Thanks to Facebook’s direct licensing deals with several major labels, publishers and PROs, Instagram has also implemented features like Music Stickers that allow users to soundtrack their Stories, choosing from a wide catalog of music. Snapchat is also in ongoing licensing talks with major labels, likely to use music in their own Stories feature as well.
I don’t think it would be viable for Spotify to try encroaching on Instagram and Snapchat’s territory in these cases, in part because it wouldn’t align with Spotify’s core product anyway.
• • •
This brings me to the second reason why I don’t think Stories for Playlists work: The Stories format works best for short, daily updates that disappear after 24 hours, which doesn’t mesh well with Spotify’s product and brand.
While Spotify’s specialty is in curation and recommendation, which could align well with the Stories format, the streaming service also touts itself as a discovery platform — sifting through a more or less permanent catalog of tens of millions of songs that always accessible as an archive (assuming music distributors comply), and are constantly increasing in number.
In contrast, Stories, borne out of Snapchat’s interface, are designed to disappear completely from the app, and users typically don’t have the desire to dig through a “back catalog” of previously-uploaded Stories. The feature’s success depends on real-time engagement within a social network, rather than on any sort of catalog buildup.
Incidentally, Spotify’s aggressive investment in podcasts this year — particularly daily news podcasts, e.g. their new venture with El Tiempo, the largest newspaper in Colombia by circulation — could cultivate the lean-in, daily consumer mindset on which something like Stories thrives. (I don’t think the Daily Mix playlists currently satisfy this criteria even though they’re updated every day, because these playlists arguably don’t foster any closer connection between artists and fans.)
But for the most part, Spotify’s bread-and-butter is in creating dynamic consumer experiences around a static pile of catalog, not in delivering temporary, real-time updates around an artist’s personality or social life.
• • •
This leads to my third point about why Stories won’t work on Spotify, which also ties to its core product: Spotify is not a social network.
The Stories format, having originated on Snapchat and been popularized by Instagram, has its roots in social networking, as an added, alternative layer atop more “permanent” social-media feeds.
As I’ve written in the past, however, Spotify has deliberately taken steps to make its platform less social over time, rolling back its previously tight-knit integration with Facebook as well as removing its native messaging features, reportedly because of “low demand.”
Stories feature might help Spotify increase engagement on its app — but not necessarily with artists, because that direct social mechanism still isn’t there for artists to feed Stories directly to fans or followers; instead, they would simply sit dormant within playlists, requiring fans to know where and how to dish them out in the first place.
• • •
This leads me to my fourth and final point, and the titular one for this post: Spotify is not a direct-to-fan marketing platform.
I don’t think Spotify alone is necessarily to blame for this. It’s a flaw that pervades the wider streaming landscape, which partially thrives on the perception of being “direct-to-fan” despite actually being a detached, all-you-can-eat rental service.
To me, “direct-to-fan” cannot exist without its counterpart, “direct-to-artist.”
An artist who is selling and marketing direct-to-fan is interacting, well, directly with fans. It can still be a one-to-many rather than one-to-one interaction — but there should be a way for artists to contact fans directly through social or email accounts, and ideally get more granular information on where those fans are from, what there interests are, etc. so that they can be re-marketed to more effectively.
In the other direction, fans consuming direct-to-artist means that they can interact directly with the artist, and/or contribute directly to that artist financially, instead of such contributions being filtered and warped by some kind of middleman.
Given these two definitions, I would argue that Stories on Snapchat and Instagram are both direct-to-fan and direct-to-artist. Not only can artists broadcast their stories directly to their fans and followers, but users can also reply to Stories in a manner that goes directly to the creator. Artists can also include polls and Q&A stickers in their Instagram Stories and even highlight other users’ stories in their own, implying multiple levels of interactivity beyond just commenting.
In contrast, a platform like Spotify is neither direct-to-fan nor direct-to-artist. Firstly, artists can’t interact directly with fans on the platform — let alone actually know who those fans really are — and can’t send users direct notifications or updates on their own terms (Spotify handles such notifications themselves, usually about new music on Fridays).
Moreover, Spotify payments are far from direct-to-artist. As industry analysts have widely covered, if you pay $9.99/month for a Spotify subscription, your money doesn’t go directly to the artists you listen to on the platform. Instead, your money is put into a giant pool with all the other subscribers’ money plus ad revenue, which is then divvied up among all the artists on Spotify’s platform based on their overall share of listening.
In short, the streaming service is the intermediary that prevents interactions between fans and artists from being direct — a fundamental misalignment with the Stories format.
In fact, we’ve already witnessed a case of this misalignment in the “Behind the Lyrics” feature with Genius.
Back in April 2019, Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams complained about the Behind the Lyrics feature not being updated for the band’s song “Hard Times” to reflect the meaning of the song more accurately. According to a tweet from Williams, the band had tried unsuccessfully to alter the lyric annotations displayed alongside the song for around a year.
If Spotify were even slightly more of a “direct-to-fan” platform, Williams and/or other members of Paramore would have been able to go directly into the Spotify for Artists dashboard and change the lyric annotations on their own, thereby maintaining close to full control over their image. In this case, Spotify is the only middleman between Paramore and its listeners, making the flow look like Paramore <-> Spotify <-> Listener.
Instead, based on the permissions required to make the Spotify/Genius partnership come to life, the chain of middlemen looks more like Paramore <-> Publisher <-> Genius <-> Spotify <-> Listener — which creates much more friction in the process of trying to change even a minor display on the streaming service.
Based on this inherent friction, I think the Stories for Playlists format ultimately won’t be as compelling to music fans as incumbent Stories features on other social platforms, and therefore will attract lower viewership; in addition, it will be difficult for artists to measure the true impact of playlist Stories, which will keep them motivated to post more on Instagram and Snapchat than on a streaming service.
Spotify already gave up much of its brand as a social ecosystem, and there will be an incredible amount of inertia to bringing that back to life.