09 December 2011
The good folks of Spotify are certainly changing things up. Last week they announced the addition of music based apps to their service, and now they're taking on Pandora.
"We've built a radio app on top of our platform," said Spotify co-founder and Chief Executive Daniel Ek during his announcement at LeWeb. "It's kind of like Pandora, but with unlimited skipping and unlimited stations."
Up until now, Spotify has only allowed subscribers to play the specific songs or albums they chose. With stations, users can now choose a category and let Spotify do the picking. And, the unlimited skipping is likely to be a big draw.
In contrast to Pandora - where skipping is limited due to the fact that they pay music labels by the song - if subscribers dislike the Spotify song choice they can skip to the next one as many times as they like.
According to the company's official blog post: "Starting a radio station is easy. Click 'Start Artist Radio' at the top of any artist page or just drag a track to 'Radio' in the left sidebar. Spotify will make a radio station of similar music. Your station will keep playing music based on your initial choice.
They added: "Thanks to our all-new intelligent recommendation engine and multi-million track library, Spotify Radio is a music discovery experience without equal."
This is a significant change for the company, according to Ek. Spotify had previously favoured a "lean-forward" experience where users actively controlled their music choice, while this marks a shift to a more "lean-back" experience.
However, according to Ek the changes reflect the preferences of Spotify subscribers. "It was a big use case people were asking for,"Ek said. "Spotify historically hasn't been good at curating music."
Additionally, the change increases the importance of exposing people to new music. According to Ek, when subscribers start using Spotify for music discovery, "they move from ownership to the access model," which helps to increase revenue.
Skip all you like with Spotify Radio
The good folks of Spotify are certainly changing things up. Last week they announced the addition of music based apps to their service, and now they're taking on Pandora. "We've built a radio app on top of our platform," said Spotify co-founder and Chief Executive Daniel Ek during his announcement at LeWeb. "It's kind of like Pandora, but with unlimited skipping and unlimited stations."
Up until now, Spotify has only allowed subscribers to play the specific songs or albums they chose. With stations, users can now choose a category and let Spotify do the picking. And, the unlimited skipping is likely to be a big draw.
In contrast to Pandora - where skipping is limited due to the fact that they pay music labels by the song - if subscribers dislike the Spotify song choice they can skip to the next one as many times as they like.
According to the company's official blog post: "Starting a radio station is easy. Click 'Start Artist Radio' at the top of any artist page or just drag a track to 'Radio' in the left sidebar. Spotify will make a radio station of similar music. Your station will keep playing music based on your initial choice.
They added: "Thanks to our all-new intelligent recommendation engine and multi-million track library, Spotify Radio is a music discovery experience without equal."
This is a significant change for the company, according to Ek. Spotify had previously favoured a "lean-forward" experience where users actively controlled their music choice, while this marks a shift to a more "lean-back" experience.
However, according to Ek the changes reflect the preferences of Spotify subscribers. "It was a big use case people were asking for,"Ek said. "Spotify historically hasn't been good at curating music."
Additionally, the change increases the importance of exposing people to new music. According to Ek, when subscribers start using Spotify for music discovery, "they move from ownership to the access model," which helps to increase revenue.
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