Spotify’s Role as Your Big Brother — Watching, Suggesting, Knowing Too Much
A Spotify Interface Analysis with Maya Shabtai.
Spotify is used by 365 million people worldwide and has grown as one of the most popular “freemium” music streaming services, controlling 32% of the global streaming market for music. (Freemium, meaning the service has different features depending on a free or premium subscription). Since its formation in 2006, the platform has increasingly incorporated features into the company’s platform making the app much more than just a simple radio.
Interface
The Spotify mobile app interface is divided into three tabs: “Home,” “Search,” and “Your Library.” The first section on the Home page contains your top most played playlists and albums, giving you easy access to content that you’re a fan of. In my case, a decent amount of Jon Bellion. The rest of the page is laid out into personalized recommendations on artists, genres, playlists, decades, or even “vibes” like “Happy” or “Evening Commute” based on the content that you listen to. The goal is to provide users with new content that they are likely to enjoy in hopes of increasing their time spent on the platform. Spotify even provides you with a “Daily Mix,” a playlist that is made just for you based on the type of content you consume. Using language like “Made for You” and “Uniquely Yours” makes these playlists feel personalized and even hand-picked even though they are created by an algorithm. Because Spotify gives you so many avenues of music exploration, right on the home page, it is designed to be a “sticky platform” — one where content is centrally located for audiences to come to.
The Search tab is organized into tiles containing different genres and moods. This tab is the most uniform from user to user with the exception of the two tiles at the top, “Your top genres,” and the “Made for you” tile. The “Made for you” tile builds on the personalized recommendations on the Home page and provides you with even more content that is tailored to your preferences. Additional sections in this tile include “Your Genre Mixes,” “Your Artist Mixes,” “Your Decade Mixes,” “Soundtrack your day,” and “Discover New Music.” By providing both standard and personalized content, Spotify allows you to engage with content that the masses are listening to while also making your experience on the platform feel unique. It makes users feel like they’re a part of a community while also having a sense of individuality.
Gustav Söderström, Spotify’s Chief R&D Officer, captures this individual yet communal music experience in a March 2021 marketing video.
“There isn’t just one Spotify experience. There are actually more like 345 million different Spotify experiences — one for each listener. Every day, half a trillion events — whether they are searches, listens, likes, or countless other actions — take place on Spotify, powering and guiding our machine learning system. This gives us the ability to drive discovery in a way that audio has never seen before.”
The Library tab is the most variable from user to user since it contains your curated playlists. Spotify allows you to personalize these playlists with unique titles and photos, which empowers users with a sense of artistry over their music library. Unlike the other tabs, here the user becomes more than just a listener, but also a creator. Spotify doesn’t just personalize their listening experience but also provides the user with agency to design the interface and their experience on the platform. A 2017 internet meme had users creating elaborate stories simply with the songs in their playlists, which resulted in hilarious and highly “memeable” content for Spotify (see below).
Beyond Spotify
Not only does Spotify provide users with customizable (and often creatively named) playlists but it also gives users the opportunity to engage with other interfaces. There are several third-party integrations which utilize your data to make predictions about your music preferences. Some track listening habits, while others give details about lyrics and artists, but a favorite third-party application is “Judge My Spotify.” This AI webapp, developed by Pudding.com accesses your most played artists, songs, and albums and generates personalized insults roasting your taste in music. Another popular web application is “Obscurify”, a site that analyzes your music library and rates how mainstream your sound is. It will even calculate how your current songs compare to your all time listening trends with percentages of changes in happiness, energy, and danceability. While Obscurify is an interesting use of metadata, it does raise questions about the trends of conformity within Spotify and other popular apps.
These third-party apps follow a trend within Spotify of curated, personalized and spreadable content (Jenkins). We like having a computer tell us what music is like, so long as it’s contained in a cute infographic we can share with our friends. Spotify tracks user activity everyday, allowing for a rich source of data to be used in features like “Spotify Wrapped”, an end of year “state of the union” for your account. December rolls around and users get a review of their listening habits of the past 12 months. This allows users to see everything from top genres and most plays to if you were in the top 5% of an artist’s listeners. These “Spotify Wrapped” stories get posted to various social media platforms as friends compare their musical summaries and boast about being in the top percent of listeners for famous artists.
Conclusion
Spotify has continued to innovate on both its platform and its connectivity. It has added collaborative playlists, streaming sessions, sleep timer, and interactive lyrics/animations just to name a few of its recent features. The usability of the app increases with the addition of several of these features. Lyrics can make songs more accessible for those with hearing loss and the paired animations allow artists to control the expression of their music. Beside just acting as entertainment, Spotify also has the sleep timer function which helps users fall asleep music but will shut off the app’s audio after a specified time.
Spotify functions as a social media platform more so than any other music streaming app, and it shows by their dedication to social features. By friending and following accounts, you can see in real time, other music being played, creating a “right place, right time” mentality amongst users. The collaborative playlist feature gives control to multiple users which is one of the essential qualities of a balanced road trip or party playlist. During the COVID pandemic, Spotify unveiled its “Group Session” beta feature which allowed people to listen to the same music at the same time, taking the collaborative playlist to a whole new level of engagement.
With personalized content and a vast library of music, books, ASMR, erotica, podcasts, and almost any audio in between, Spotify is cultivating a user base — nay, a fanbase — more than willing to fork over data for the sake of experience. And while this collection can be overwhelming, Spotify soothes our worries with carefully crafted playlist, artist and song suggestions, making us feel like some higher power (almighty algorithm) is watching over our listening sessions. So relax, put on some tunes, try out a new artist and know that it’s probably only a matter of time before Spotify will be able to predict our exact music taste.
