Spotify is no longer just a streaming app, it's a social network | TechCrunch

Spotify is great, but it’s primarily a single-player experience. Music, on the other hand, is an inherently social experience. Tiktok—originally, musical.ly—figured out how to make music social by licensing music, introducing viral “challenges,” and making user-generated content easier to create, even if they didn’t technically build a social graph... See more

While Spotify started as an active, intent-driven platform to find the song you want to hear, today it is a more passive, discovery-led listening experience.

Creating ways to connect with listeners could offer Spotify a way to combat the enduring narrative that it’s screwing over musicians.

It’s approaching problems the way every late-stage internet platform does, at least before it discovers its limits: by presuming total victory and control over the industry it’s been working to enclose. Spotify’s success as a basic streaming service eventually entitled it to a central role in how music is made and distributed. Why shouldn’t its suc... See more

The world’s biggest technology companies and social media platforms are all beginning to embrace audio as a core feature. Apple, Amazon, and Google all have their own voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, respectively), and Twitter rolled out audio tweets as a core feature this past year. Twitter is also currently testing out a new A... See more