Finally, Spotify has answered to its consumers. Users used to be restricted to shuffle and would have to pay premium to listen on demand. Spotify’s new version allows users to listen to certain playlists on demand. In total, that’s around 750 tracks that Spotify is serving up to users for on-demand listening. Perhaps other streaming services will follow Spotify’s lead.
I think this is a very interesting move by Spotify. It is definitely a change we all wanted, but probably did not expect. The key points that I would like to consider are whether Spotify will gradually increase the amount of playlists available for on-demand listening, and how this will affect other companies in general.
In my opinion, Spotify’s actions demonstrate the new way in which companies are seeking to constantly change their approach to better suit their customers. While Spotify reigns supreme in terms of music apps today, so did Pandora not too long ago (and who could have ever imagine Facebook overtaking MySpace so rapidly).
On another note, I noticed that, while they added on-demand listening, they did not decrease the advertisements. Therefore, the ability to skip more songs will correlate with the amount of times advertisements are played. However, I am interested in seeing if the rise in advertisements results in more Premium members. If it does, then this will have been a very smart move by Spotify.
Lastly, I am interested in seeing if the advertisement ‘bubble’ ever pops. There has been an unforeseen increase in Ads everywhere, from YouTube to Facebook. Therefore, it will be interesting to see if an application comes a long, with no Ads and on-demand listening, and is able to be as sustainable and profitable.