Reels for Spotify?

Cross-application of user experiences.

Bananza (Belly Dancer) by Akon plays in the background.

I am proud to say that I’ve been a loyal Spotify user for quite some time now. When I was in India, I used premium and positively experienced the app with no ads. I am a free user now that I’ve been in the US for a while now, and I am a student, I’ve been a little here and there to migrate to premium.

And I just noticed the reels on Spotify.

I did come across the daylists recently and was amused by the feature. However I hadn’t noticed the doom-scrolling conveniently migrating to Spotify as well. As someone who often has music on in the background while working, walking, sitting in the bus, writing, washing dishes or even reading, I can say it holds an important part in my life.

I am writing today to share some thoughts I had when I experienced reels on Spotify.

Multi-sensory vs Dual-sensory? — Doom-Scrolling on Instagram is real. It captures your auditory, visual and cognitive attention for seconds. And those seconds keep repeating, until you consciously quit the app, otherwise you cannot escape the experience. While on Spotify, it’s primarily an audio experience. The reel feature on Spotify is interesting as it will help me quickly look for a song in a playlist, however they’re not quite there yet.

And they shouldn’t be.

I’ve observed my attention span decrease as my Instagram time has increased. It’s an inversely proportionate relationship. What I’ve observed is, since it captures 3 of my senses, it is almost a multi-sensory experience that is absorbing my attention to a screen. The minute I scroll a reel, I am absorbed into the experience where I forget what my physical environment looks or feels like.

As for Spotify, my current experience helps me be aware of my environment by only capturing my auditory senses. This in turn enhances my cognitive attention to better produce output.

I believe the reels on Spotify have a different purpose.

I quite like the fact that they have used #hashtags to create an experience to look for music through reels. Which is probably one of the many prominent use cases of Spotify. To easily look for music.

Now that companies are entities and they live among us, it is easy to imagine they will replicate human behavior, even though they aren’t human. In this case, to Steal like an Artist from other companies and applying experiences in your own feels like human behavior.

What I mean is, cross-application of experiences can be an exercise to experiment whether a particular (and popular) experience may be applicable to your own product, is quite similar to learning behaviors from other humans and applying in your life. Or stealing ideas from other artists and applying them in your art, in your way.

An overlap in the experience of Human-Computer Interaction, where an interaction is absorbing human behavior and widely applying it to a wide array of experiences.