Spotify Product Analysis
Product Overview
Spotify is the largest paid music streaming service in the world. They are branded as “Music for everyone”, and primarily target millennials ranging from high school students to young professionals. Spotify has created an abstraction to offer any music at anytime and anywhere. Their largest competitors include YouTube, Apple Music, Pandora, and SoundCloud.
User Needs
- Access to large music library at low-cost
- Discover new music
- Selectively store offline music
- Stream music on web and mobile platforms
Product Value
Business Model
Currently, a majority of users begin using Spotify as a free member before transitioning over to the paid premium service. The free membership allows users to get a good feel for the product by allowing them to have access to all of Spotify’s music library. Generally, the nuisance of interrupting advertisements and the inability to play particular songs on a mobile device will push a user to subscribe to Spotify Premium.
Considering Spotify’s target market is millennials, Spotify’s student discount is a great gateway for college students to subscribe to Spotify Premium at $4.99 monthly rather than the standard $9.99 rate. Also, with the introduction of the family plan, which supports up to six members for $14.99 monthly, users could potentially be paying $2.50 monthly for Spotify Premium outside of college. The subscription model appears to be successful as it portrays Spotify to be low-cost service.
Personalization
One of Spotify’s largest strengths is having the ability to customize playlists and search rankings based on the user’s interactions with the product. The Discover Weekly playlist is generated every week to highlight new sets of songs based on a user’s previous music preferences.
In addition, the Discover Weekly playlist subliminally gets users into a habit loop. The routine would be listening to a new playlist during the week. The reward would be the excitement and satisfaction a user gets from listening to new music. Lastly, the cue would be every Sunday, signaling the start of a fresh week with a new playlist.
Similar to the Discover Weekly playlist, Spotify generates multiple other playlists such as a Daily Mix, Yearly Wrap, Time Capsule, and Release Radar. Each one of the playlists has their own theme and are also personally tailored based on a user’s music preferences. As a user continues to use Spotify, more user data such as skipped songs, favorite artists, and followed playlists are all accounted to fine-tune Spotify’s personalization algorithms.
Seamless User Experiences
Spotify is packed with seamless user experiences that are often taken for granted by the user. For starters, the search experience on Spotify is fairly unique, because a user will only use the search bar if he or she knows the exact song title. In all other cases, a user will navigate through the generic genre and mood titles to find a playlist.
After selecting a category, a set of playlists are displayed. The titles of the playlists are generally simple, yet well defined. Titles such as “Productive Morning” and “White Noise” bring a sense of life to the playlist showcasing the playlist as a lifestyle rather than just a curated list of songs.
Another great Spotify experience is maintaining offline music. An entire playlist can be downloaded when the “Downloaded” radio button is checked. Playlists are constantly synced and downloaded when wifi is available, allowing a user to automatically stay up to date with the most recent playlist changes. Having offline music enables a user to listen to music throughout times of limited or poor cellular connection such as a commute to work.
My favorite Spotify feature is Spotify Connect, which allows a user to easily switch between devices without a break in music. This feature also allows a user to make his or her phone as an audio controller that can adjust music selection and volume on external devices like speakers and computers. While the phone is connected as an audio controller, the user will be to make or attend phone calls without interrupting the music playing on connected devices.
Social Aspect
Spotify has grown to become a platform that easily allows users to share and spread music. After connecting Spotify with social media accounts, a user will have the chance to follow their friends to see what music they are currently listening to. Furthermore, Spotify provides a variety of sharing options such as sharing via Facebook Messenger, Tumblr, and embedded code to integrate into a website. In specific, Spotify has designed the shared links on Facebook Messenger and iMessage to be converted to a thumbnail that showcases the song’s cover photo. As a result of showing a well-designed thumbnail rather than an URL link, users will be more likely to click on the shared link.
Future Improvements
- Spotify has recently built a feature that suggests concerts around your location that fit a user’s music interest. It would be a great opportunity for Spotify to create smaller communities prior to a concert allowing the user to meet people of similar music interests.
- Dealing with song requests at social gatherings still appear to be a chaotic process. A simple solution would be allowing a user to create a live playlist that queues up song requests from other users.
- If Spotify truly wants to have “Music for everyone”, I believe Spotify needs to expand its international music selection. As of now, there are multiple Spotify replicas that primarily focus on a specific region such as Saavn for Indian music and KuGuo for Chinese music.
- On the note of international music, Spotify often struggles to differentiate international music from western music, therefore creates and suggests playlists that have a mix western and international music. As a result, this creates an unnatural user experience, since a user can encounter language changes every other song within a playlist.
Conclusion
Spotify is clearly a very user-friendly and engaging product that continues to address user needs through a low-cost subscription model and a personalized product. With the support of exceptional engineering and design, Spotify has been able to create great user experiences that have uniquely positioned Spotify as the leading paid music streaming service. Moving forward, I am curious to see how Spotify will continue to compete for market share in the music streaming industry against other paid services like Apple Music and Pandora and unpaid services like YouTube and iHeartRadio.