The Way We Listen to Music Has Changed Forever

The way we listen to music has changed forever.  Music streaming services have usurped traditional ways of listening – CDs’s, tape cassettes and vinyl have paled into insignificance over the last few decades. The main players in the industry are Spotify, Apple, Deezer, Amazon music and Tidal, to name a few. 

A spokesperson at 3business.com stated, ‘without doubt Spotify is an ever growing platform improving every year but you need to keep a close eye on some of the released features, or you may miss them.’  My personal favourite is Spotify and have been a Spotify user for over 4 years.  So what makes Spotify the go to for music streaming?

1. Amazing sound quality

Spotify enables you to listen to your music on higher quality, for online streaming and downloaded songs. However, it does consume more storage and data.

2. Similar tunes

The spotify algorithm of course analyses what music tracks you have played and suggests similar tracks and artists.   There’s a myriad of artists and tracks I probably wouldn’t have discovered if it wasn’t for this feature.

3. Voice control

You can converse with Spotify by talking to the mobile app and ask it to play a song, album or playlist. How do you do that?  Just press the ‘Search’ button and ask away.

4.  Lyrics

Spotify shows lyrics but only for select songs, but Last November, Spotify confirmed it was testing real-time lyrics synced to music in select markets.  This has come about with a new agreement with then lyrics provider Musixmatch.  This new feature will offer real-time lyrics in the language in which the songs are sung. By tapping “Lyrics” at the bottom of the “Now Playing” screen, you can sing along to your favourite songs.

5.  Some new Spotify features out this year in 2020 includes:  

a. A new home screen with a personalised experience with relevant short cuts. It separates the content into familiar content at the top and new recommended tracks at the bottom. 

Moving further down the home screen, ‘podcasts’, ‘weekend’, ‘fav albums’, ‘more of what you like’ and ‘moods’.

b. There are a couple of new features in the songs themselves. If you click the ellipsis next to the songs, you can see the song credits; artists and lyricists –  a long awaited feature that finally gives the credit to the song creators.

c.  On some play lists you can hide the song. So if there are playlists that you didn’t create and a song that’s been stuck in your head too long and you don’t want to hear it again, then you now have the control to disable the song –  another step towards personalisation.

d.  Again personalisation, there is a new feature called ‘commute’.  It shows song groups like, ‘Daily Drive’ and as Spotify knows where you are, suggests songs and news titbits that are relevant. ‘Songs to sing in the car’ is another one.  Overall ads some variety to your listening experience whilst driving with snippets of news in between tracks.

e. Spotify Horoscopes: This new feature gives your horoscope and suggests related music to your current horoscope. Pretty cool. 

Spotify is popping up everywhere online and the reason is that Spotify have developed strong partnerships with other platforms and big brands.  Their targeted marketing strategy is paramount to their success. Gaining inbound customers from all these various marketing channels for any business however large or small, can be achieved with help from a certified Hubspot freelancer who can help you inbound the best prospects for your product or service.  Spotify have targeted gamers so they can enjoy their music whilst playing Xbox with a generous 6 month trial. In Australia, they’ve joined forces with Vodaphone offering a 30 day trial.  Esports partnerships are also prevalent with the likes of Riot Games and becoming the exclusive audio streaming partner of the game developer’s League of Legends (LoL) esports division.  The official League of Legends soundtrack amounts to over 4.8 million Spotify listeners per month—a huge number of both gamers and Spotify users

The rumours are that Spotify is also launching a priority global “Umbrella” brand focused on reaching out to Black music consumers.  The mysterious new brand, says Spotify, will “live both on and off platform” and will be a global reach – implying a major above-the-line campaign may be in the pipeline to promote it. Watch this music spacer in the next few months for developments.