Spotify’s biggest redesign in a decade has pushed the music app in a new direction – and it’s finally pushed me away.
Spotify, it’s been fun, but it’s time to queue up that ‘sad indie’ playlist you’re so keen for me to listen to – I’m leaving for Apple Music.
I’ve been a Spotify Premium subscriber for over six years and been with the service for a decade. But the new Spotify redesign, which CEO Daniel Ek called “the biggest change to the platform since 2013”, is an experimental album too far for me.
The Spotify app’s redesigned Home feed isn’t actually as bad as I feared. The TikTok-style vertical scroll that confronts you when you tap ‘Music’ or ‘Podcasts & Shows’ has the slight try-hard feel of a Coldplay stadium show. There are hints of Instagram, Netflix and YouTube, too.
But this increasingly bloated mess is only part of the reason I’ve restarted my Apple Music three-month free trial. Aside from the sense that this is another Instagram moment – when an app’s original purpose becomes the support act to monetizing eyeballs – the new Spotify is really an admission that its business model is broken.
It isn’t the only streaming service with that problem. But with Spotify consistently ranking towards the bottom of the league table for artist payouts, and features like the long-awaited Spotify HiFi further away than ever, it’s time for me to stage dive into the arms of Apple Music.A new MTV moment
An alternative explanation for my desire to leave the new Spotify, other than it being objectively bad, is that I’m simply too old for it. Most Spotify users are aged 34 and under (opens in new tab) – and its youngest fans are more interested in visual music discovery. That’s a bit different from going to Pitchblack Playback (opens in new tab) to listen to an album in complete darkness.
This hit me when reading Spotify CEO Daniel Ek’s interview with Billboard (opens in new tab), when he was asked to explain video-themed features like Canvas (the eight-second video loops you see in the background when playing a song) and the even longer Spotify Clips.
“It’s about looking to younger consumers for inspiration,” Ek explained. “If you think about it, in the music industry, when we went from having a radio to MTV, it was a hell of a lot better, and it allowed totally different artists to get a new way of communicating” he added.
