Music To My Ears, Or Just Noise?

Spotify’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Belonging (DEIB) Product Strategies

Music is a universal language, enjoyed and expressed worldwide impacting individuals of all races, genders, classes, and levels of ability. Spotify’s strategy to be inclusive of all music enjoyers includes both external and internal methods, for employees and users alike. Across the industries, DEIB efforts have primarily focused on internal programs and policies, such as inclusive hiring and employee resources groups. Inclusive product design is a growing field within the technology sector, and companies such as IDEO have a collective of employees dedicated to inclusive design. Having been a user of Spotify for the last eight years, I have seen the growth of their DEIB strategies on the user end. However, how impactful is their product design and curation to the communities it’s supposed to serve? This memo will take a critical look at their 2021 Social Equity Impact Report, assessing levels of effectiveness, impact, innovation, and conventionality.

User Awareness of ‘Cultural Moments’

Spotify seems to use U.S recognized awareness months & cultural recognition holidays as their foundation of showing support. They mention in their report that “As a brand we believe in the importance of celebrating these calendared cultural moments to drive impact, while also finding ways to uplift these communities all year.”

They highlight the following as ‘cultural moments’:

• Black History Month
• International Women’s Day
• Asian American & Pacific Islander History Month
• LGBTQIA+ Pride Month
• Latinx Heritage Month

The cultural moments above address the broad spectrums of race, gender, and sexuality. These factors are arguably the most visible and discussed identities in the DEIB field, comparable to what other companies have sought out equity fluent consultants’ knowledge for when expanding their DEIB strategies. However, there is plenty of room to improve in Spotify’s definition of ‘cultural moments’.

First, I believe that aside from International Women’s Day, most of these moments are primarily U.S based–despite Spotify having headquarters globally. Expanding their moments for global inclusion would address many more of their users and could highlight the importance of DEIB strategies around the world. For example, also highlighting important holidays such as Diwali or Mid-Autumn Festival for users located in their Asia-Pacific Sector.

Second, Spotify’s recognition of racial communities is lacking, only including the largest and most visible racial groups in the DEIB field. Discussions regarding race within the United State are often seen as a black and white issue, only with the last decade of atrocities to marginalized communities bringing awareness to race outside of that binary. While inclusion of Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, and the Latinx community very much exists outside of that binary, this is largely missing out on other racial communities across the United States and the world. For example, Spotify could add to their definition of cultural moments holidays such as Indigenous Peoples Day. This addition could bring Spotify up to par with other companies that already include Native & Indigenous communities in their racial category. Furthermore, there is room for Spotify to innovate and lead the way in disaggregating their data on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders for their DEIB strategies. The issue here lies in that the U.S government historically combines Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in classifications, despite those communities being very diverse and non-monolithic. This aggregation contributes to erasure of Pacific Islanders, since they are a minority in the combined data. Thus, Spotify could be leaders in this issue by bringing awareness to Pacific Islanders in their own light (separate from Asian Americans) and collecting both employee and user data that separates the two groups.

Lastly, I would recommend that Spotify lead with ‘finding ways to uplift these communities all year’ instead of leading specific cultural moments. Upon first glance and with a critical mind, there is not enough information within the report that highlights the continuous racial DEIB efforts on Spotify. In my experience within community organizing and inclusive user experience research, the most provoking type of social impact is rooted in a belief that individual contributors (in this case, Spotify as a company) could create social & structural change. Those changes must not be rooted in specific moments, but rather in a continuous effort that then highlights specific cultural moments. Leading with this in mind could contribute more to their DEIB efforts.

Underrepresented User Amplification

The second half of Spotify’s product design for social impact highlights three programs that ‘amplifies’ underrepresented users–defining users in this scope as content creators. In short, these three programs include:

1. Frequency, a global initiative and holistic destination for celebrating Black art, entertainment, creativity, culture, and community both on- and off-platform.
2. Sound Up, a global program that gives underrepresented podcasters the tools to boost their platforms and build their own shows.
3. EQUAL, a one-stop destination that highlights the work of women artists and podcasters.

These in-product design and curation efforts are bringing awareness to the black community, women, and broadly ‘underrepresented users’. This seems to be the biggest space for growth within social impact, and I suggest the following areas to improve on.

First, Spotify is uniquely positioned in focusing on its content creators–that’s who makes the platform usable and interesting for its consumers. Other companies that are expanding their focus on content creators include Google, where its in-house technology incubator dedicated a project to evaluate BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) content creator experiences. However, I would be interested in seeing Spotify focus on its consumers as users, asking questions such as ‘what inclusive design features could benefit the disabled community?’ or ‘how can we motivate consumers to value and access these programs?’. There is plenty of growth in expanding their DEIB efforts for these users.

Second, it would be beneficial to standardize their ‘cultural moments’ efforts with their amplification efforts. Their cultural moments portion identifies the LGBTQIA+ community explicitly, so why don’t they also do that for their amplification efforts? Understandably, DEIB strategies could always be improved and the business case for them are only on the rise as of recently. However, their amplification efforts seem to only cover race through the black community, gender through women, and then lump everything else as ‘underrepresented’. Spotify had a decent foundation of in-product DEIB strategies with its cultural moments portion, so using that as a guide to expand their programs for different types of users would follow in building a stronger foundation.

Overall, I believe that Spotify has a focus on in-product DEIB efforts that could be largely improved. The effectiveness of Spotify’s in-product DEIB efforts could be better, as it seems like currently, one of their biggest goals is awareness and empowerment. The recommendations and critical analysis above show that their efforts for content creators on their platform are the most effective, while those same efforts for consumers are lacking. The impact of Spotify’s DEIB efforts is what could be improved on the most. Arguably difficult to measure, their Equity Impact report does not seem to publicize or measure the long-term, post test impact of these programs. What does the amplification of black content creators do in their careers? A simple study taking a look at this could emphasize the impact of their programs. Lastly, on the topic of innovation and conventionality, Spotify is both innovative and conventional. They are one of the largest music technology companies, setting the standard for others and being fairly conventional in that sense. Their user interface is unique and as a user of eight years, it’s clear how innovative they have become in finding different ways to highlight underrepresented communities. However, they have room for innovation with recommendations regarding inclusive interaction design for consumers and intentional data collection for marginalized groups. I plan on being a user of Spotify for many years, and hope to see their continual growth and success in creating social impact.