2015-05-21



Hands-on with the new Spotify.

He was speaking as a revamp of the platform was unveiled, enabling users to soundtrack their lives better than ever. Spotify is branching out from its core streaming-music biz to encompass shortform videos, announcing partners including Disney’s ESPN, NBC, Viacom’s Comedy Central, Conde Nast Entertainment and Vice News. “We’re a music company at heart,” CEO Daniel Ek said at the company’s press event Wednesday — but it’s now looking to bring those users to video as part of their daily media diet.Streaming music service Spotify has announced new features including adding podcasts and video; music that adapts to the listener’s running pace; and the promise of smarter abilities to serve the right playlists for the time of day, activity and habits of the user.


Spotify announced Wednesday that it has added video content and new playlists in its latest update, as it works to maintain its footing in the ever-expanding streaming market. The new version not only brings podcasts to what was previously just a music app, but also, a “video capsule” offering streaming video from partners like Comedy Central, Vice News, and The Nerdist, reports The Verge.


The company’s launch event in New York on Wednesday, helmed by its chief executive Daniel Ek, offered some deeper clues about how Spotify is evolving, and the key challenges it faces as it aims to grow beyond its current 60 million active users, of whom 15 million pay for the service. The service will now offer video clips and audio shows, including content from Disney, ABC, NBC, ESPN, BBC News, Comedy Central and MTV, among others. Video has come to Spotify too, as well as podcasts – suddenly expanding the music-streaming service massively thanks to a range of new media partnerships.

It will include the spoken word in podcasts from WNYC and others, and add video to take on rivals like YouTube and Tidal and potentially earn more money. Recent months have seen a wave of stories about Apple’s supposed backroom machinations with music labels, encouraging them to clamp down on Spotify’s free, unlimited streaming service – which in turn would boost the prospects for Apple’s upcoming relaunch of its Beats Music. The new content and features are launching this week for users in the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Sweden, with additional territories to follow, Ek said. Apple’s advantages include a massive war chest to pay for exclusives on big albums; the fact that it can push its music service on hundreds of millions of iOS devices; and the way rivals have to pay it 30% of any money they make from in-app subscriptions on iOS – which means many of them charge $12.99 for a monthly subscription to cover that extra cost.

This is a bold and interesting move from Spotify, one that will twig the attention of the millions of runners out there, most of whom probably already listen to music while exercising. The service is now also offering mood-centric playlists that recall rival Songza’s approach to playlists. “We’re bringing you a deeper, richer, more immersive Spotify experience,” Daniel Ek, Spotify founder and CEO, said in a statement. “We want Spotify to help soundtrack your life by offering an even wider world of entertainment with an awesome mix of the best music, podcasts and video delivered to you throughout your day.” The company announced Tuesday that it was teaming with Starbucks to create what it called a new music “ecosystem,” in which baristas programmed music for their specific coffee shops and espresso enthusiasts could earn loyalty points for using Spotify.

But it’s also taking the fight to Apple with marketing partnerships: this week it struck deals with Starbucks and Nike, who have been two of Apple’s closest partners in the past. In recent months, the streaming service has been facing growing competition and criticism, after Taylor Swift pulled her music from Spotify last year and Jay Z re-launched Tidal with his megastar minions. It will likely face more competition later this year, as Apple is expected to relaunch Beats as its own streaming service, though it has not confirmed when the launch would take place. 2015 may not bring everything that Back to the Future II promised it would: flying cars, self-lacing shoes, we don’t see ’em happening over the next 12 months. (Then again, don’t bet against Nike.) But this year will definitely pack plenty of punch when it comes to cultural happenings.

To many users, Spotify is surely a background medium, one typically consumed while they work, commute, or exercise–rather than a lean-back-and-watch medium like TV. When Daniel Ek used the words “incredible” and “profound” in his closing sentence before handing over to musician D’Angelo to close the show, it was straight out of Apple’s press-launch playbook. Mad Max will roar back out of the apocalypse while Mad Men rides off into the sunset, rock’s Antichrist Superstar and hip-hop’s Yeezus will rise again. So it might be a tall task to ask people to shift from streaming Rhianna to watch video clips from Comedy Central’s “Broad City” or snippets of news footage on international conflicts from the likes of Vice News or BBC. Meanwhile, music bigwig Jay-Z last month launched Tidal, a music and video subscription service, arguing that services like Spotify don’t provide a sustainable model for the industry.

Ek sees a move into video as very natural for the platform. “What I’m finding with younger users is that they are so fluent and so easy and they move across all these different platforms and content,” he said. (On that note, during the Spotify event, Illana Glazer of “Broad City” joked more than once that many people might find time to watch some of these clips while on the toilet.) In fact, Mr. After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands.

Other competitors would include social services like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat; Internet-media hubs like Yahoo and AOL; and startups including Vessel, founded by ex-Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, which offers exclusive early access to video content to subscribers. The moderates in this debate typically qualify their rhetoric with “We all know we need police, but…” It’s a familiar refrain to those of us who’ve spent years in the streets and the barrios organizing around police violence, only to be confronted by officers who snarl, “But who’ll help you if you get robbed?” We can put a man on the moon, but we’re still lacking creativity down here on Earth. Ek said he also hopes to explore new formats and new video lengths with content partners, beyond the typical short-form clips media companies distribute online. “Not many people are doing really interesting video content built for mobile screens,” he said. “What happens if you build 20-minute shows on mobile?” “They have really established themselves as a leader in social audio,” said Danny Fishman, a partner at Believe Entertainment Group. “So they should be able to do the same with social video.” Believe is not among Spotify’s initial media partners. Playlists have become very important to Spotify: they’re front and centre on the service, including its new “Now” screen – which is based not just on algorithms to understand where you are and what you’re doing, but on the entirely human compiling of thousands of themed playlists by Spotify’s in-house team. Apple’s streaming service will have a similar focus: it hasn’t just hired Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe but also several of his colleagues – and it’s also paying freelance music journalists to write copy for playlists.

While law enforcers have existed in one form or another for centuries, the modern police have their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years ago, and the “disorderly conduct” of the urban poor. Fishman said Spotify’s plan to shift users from audio to video makes sense. “It expands them from the passive listening space to active viewing,” he said. “If you think about it, cable was founded on music videos. Despite claiming that its freemium model — in which it allows users some free access but charges for its premium tier — would become successful if enough people signed up, the company has actually been losing more money as it accrues more subscribers. At Spotify’s press event this week, Ek made a point of praising some of his company’s hires from the world of radio, too, which was no coincidence.

Like every structure we’ve known all our lives, it seems that the policing paradigm is inescapable and everlasting, and the only thing keeping us from the precipice of a dystopic Wild West scenario. In the immediate aftermath of the press conference there were some points raised about whether this confuses what Spotify is as a service, and there is some validity to that. One of the key battlegrounds between these two companies will be who has the best curators, but also who has the best algorithms for matching those playlists to listeners. Rather than be scared of our impending Road Warrior future, check out just a few of the practicable, real-world alternatives to the modern system known as policing: Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods to curb violence right where it starts. Every major label now has a team devoted to creating their own playlists for Spotify and rivals, while independent labels are talking about the idea of banding together to create their own equivalent.

Stop believing that police are heroes because they are the only ones willing to get in the way of knives or guns – so are the members of groups like Cure Violence, who were the subject of the 2012 documentary The Interrupters. There are also feminist models that specifically organize patrols of local women, who reduce everything from cat-calling and partner violence to gang murders in places like Brooklyn. If you’re a bit indecisive, hearing the first second or two of a track every time you jump between playlists can become tedious, and will do for those around you too if you’re doing so without headphones. While police forces have benefited from military-grade weapons and equipment, some of the most violent neighborhoods have found success through peace rather than war. The two companies both want the people initially attracted by their music or messaging to spend more time in their apps, with video clips their first move.

It feels easier than ever to access a broader range of content, and Spotify’s core message of music discovery feels very central to this user experience. Companies like Vice Media and Maker Studios, which have lots of viewers on YouTube, are keen for partnerships elsewhere to boost their income, and will want to explore partnerships with Spotify, Snapchat, Vessel and others.

Violent offenses count for a fraction of the 11 to 14 million arrests every year, and yet there is no real conversation about what constitutes a crime and what permits society to put a person in chains and a cage. Decriminalization doesn’t work on its own: The cannabis trade that used to employ poor Blacks, Latinos, indigenous and poor whites in its distribution is now starting to be monopolized by already-rich landowners. The latter was always an app that you looked at with your phone in your hand, while the former was one you listened to with your phone in your pocket.

To quote investigative journalist Christian Parenti’s remarks on criminal justice reform in his book Lockdown America, what we really need most of all is “less.” Also known as reparative or transformative justice, these models represent an alternative to courts and jails. From hippie communes to the IRA and anti-Apartheid South African guerrillas to even some U.S. cities like Philadelphia’s experiment with community courts, spaces are created where accountability is understood as a community issue and the entire community, along with the so-called perpetrator and the victim of a given offense, try to restore and even transform everyone in the process. Listening to podcasts and news may be less of a stretch: Spotify isn’t the only streaming music service expanding in that direction, with Deezer having announced its own move a day earlier. In both cases, it’s another element of the pitch for streaming to become the new radio – something you can expect to hear more about when Apple launches its service. Communities that have tools to engage with each other about problems and disputes don’t have to consider what to do after anti-social behaviors are exhibited in the first place.

To music purists it may confuse things slightly, but for the modern day media fanatic Spotify is now closer to being an all-encompassing media source, perhaps starting a trend across the industry. Millions of unused gym memberships show the commercial power of our desire to be healthier – if also (for many of us) our lack of drive to follow through on that desire. Obviously these could become police themselves and then be subject to the same abuses, but as a temporary solution they have been making a real impact. If Spotify can detect when I’m flagging in a run (ie five minutes in) and whack on Hey Boy Hey Girl by the Chemical Brothers, it’ll be on the right lines. Spotify’s pitch is that it will help emerging musicians find an audience: Ek announced at his press launch that Spotify users discover artists they’ve never heard before 2bn times a month, and he picked out singer/songwriter Sam Hunt and band MisterWives for having found 6m and 8m listeners respectively on Spotify.

We have created a tremendous amount of mental illness, and in the real debt and austerity dystopia we’re living in, we have refused to treat each other for our physical and mental wounds. This being a press conference, he didn’t talk about bruising negotiations with major labels for Spotify’s licensing deals – and he certainly didn’t mention the leaked contract between his company and Sony Music that was published this week by The Verge, providing an eye-opening insight into the business terms around streaming music back in 2011. Mental health has often been a trapdoor for other forms of institutionalized social control as bad as any prison, but shifting toward preventative, supportive and independent living care can help keep those most impacted from ending up in handcuffs or dead on the street. But all those things that weren’t mentioned will be as crucial to the company’s survival as the inventive new features and partnerships that were. But Spotify will have to be just as smart in its dealings with labels, publishers and creators in the months ahead to make that growth something that truly reshapes the music industry.

Show more