News & Reviews:   Spotify

Over the years, Spotify has developed a reputation for being a user-friendly music streaming app. For a while, the company has remained steady with its subscription fees. However, that would change soon.

Recently, Meta took on Twitter with Threads and now, another social media provider is also taking on an established platform at its own game. We are of course talking about TikTok which just launched TikTok Music, a music streaming app to rival Spotify.

People tend to use WiFi to stream videos or music. But what if you don't have WiFi access and are running out of data soon? Then you'll have to download the content for offline use, which Spotify Premium offers. Now, Spotify is looking to improve this function with a new feature.

Music streaming company Spotify may be hiking up its subscription fee in the near future after its operating costs outpaced revenue growth by two times last year. Recently, the company laid off 600 employees in order to cut costs.

Spotify is expanding its free trial preriod to attract more users to subscribe to its Premium service. Previously, the music streaming platform only offered a one-month trial for those who want to enjoy unlimited skips on their playlists. Now, it has become a three-month thing.

Now available on the popular music streaming app on both iOS and Android, there is a new ‘singing’ mode in which Spotify will use your device’s microphone to listen in while you rock out to your favourite songs. Furthermore, the mode will even judge your singing and tell you whether it’s accurate to the lyrics and tone of the song.

Spotify is adding a new feature for the users to engage in more social interactions on the music streaming platform. The feature named 'Community' is a hub for users to see what their friends have been listening to, and it also tells what playlists others recently updated.

Metaverse is something that many tech companies are trying to build nowadays, and big sharks like Meta and Microsoft already introduced their ideas earlier for how to connect people in a different way. Until now, Spotify has also jumped on the bandwagon, creating its metaverse via Roblox with the name 'Spotify Island'.

Google has announced that it will allow developers the option to offer third-party payment options for apps that is available on the Google Play Store. The pilot programme for the move will start in South Korea with the music streaming app Spotify.

Shared via an Android Developers blogpost yesterday, Google announced that it will allow Android users to select payment systems other than its own soon. Furthermore, it will only start with Spotify and other trusted partners first due to security concerns.

When a feature is popular, there will inevitably be others that get inspired by it. There are plenty of examples in the industry, with Snapchat's stories feature being one of them. This time around, Spotify seems to have been inspired by a TikTok feature.