Even before the Thanksgiving turkey is a mere memory, Christmas rolls out in full force, and that includes seasonal songs. Spotify took that opportunity to experiment with the Instagram-style story that appears to be adopted as a universal standard.
As we saw in The Fleet’s In: Twitter Launched its Version of Stories, Twitter just incorporated a disappearing stories feature, joining the ranks of Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. Spotify reportedly told Engadget that it is testing this feature now and cannot confirm if it will expand them.
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A Spotify spokesperson said in a statement: “Some of those tests end up paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning. We have no further news to share on future plans at this time,” Engadget reports.
For now, the 2020 Christmas Hits story shows videos centering around some of the singers on the playlist, like Jennifer Lopez, Kelly Clarkson and Pentatonix. It does appear to be limited to that, as Mashable’s Stan Schroeder attests, that he “wasn’t able to find a Story on any other playlist.”
This is not Spotify’s first foray into this type of format. It did give a video platform to some artists last year to connect with audiences about how they produced their music.
The question is: Would Spotify users find real value in this? That’s not a question I’m qualified to answer, though I tell you that Ivan Mehta thinks not.
Writing for The Next Web, he points out that because Instagram and Snapchat already exist as platforms for people to express their stories to the public, there is no need to add that to the music platform. He suggests that Spotfiy would have been better off connecting the consumers of the music with each other:
Currently, it’s possible to follow your friends and artists on Spotify. But you can only look at what they’re listening to on its desktop app. The Stories format can fill that lack of deep social connections on the platform in a meaningful way.
It’s an interesting idea, though I can understand why Spotify would balk at scaling up Stories to the point of having millions of users post their own stories. What do you think?