Spotify has in excess of 70 million users, thus making it the world’s biggest music streaming service. With its expansion into visual features and content, Spotify can now sharpen its competition with other major streaming and social media platforms.
A fresh multimedia format, Spotlight, introduces visual layers to enhance the listening experience for pod-casts, audio-books, news, as well as additional audio content; moreover, Spotlight offers contextual visual elements, such as images, video and text, which appear as users move through each episode. This seems like a mutual benefit since users can enjoy visual elements on pod-casts, and Spotify can gain a broader audience through the format.
Spotlight will launch will content from such Spotify partners as BuzzFeed News, Cheddar, Gimlet Media, Genius, Refinery 29, and Uninterrupted, among others. This new format will also feature content from several original series on Spotify including RISE, Secret Genius, Spotify Singles and the new Viva Latino pod-cast.
Courtney William Holt, the head of Studios and Video, noted that playlists play a significant role in the daily lives of Spotify users, thus bringing them closer to the creators they love. Holt also shared that Spotlight merges news, storytelling, information and opinion with visual elements that are delivered in play-lists across across a variety of content categories.
Matt Lieber, the co-founder and president of Gimlet Media, is hoping that with the new Spotlight partnership, they will be able to reach new listeners in “fresh and original ways,” especially since it offers new visual expressions of shows.
The programming of Spotlight will include such categories as news, pop culture, sports, politics, views-points and music, among others. More series are expected to be launched in the month of February 2018. Spotlight is available in the United States, and it will expand to additional markets in the near future.
