Spotify

Spotify has been investing heavily in the podcast industry recently as the company has acquired multiple studios in recent years. However, for some reason, Spotify is now shutting down its in-house original podcast studio known as Studio 4.

Spotify first announced its plans to roll out a new Spotify HiFi tier in February of last year, saying that it would launch “in select markets” by the end of 2021. As we covered last month, Spotify HiFi is still nowhere to be found as that deadline has come and gone. Now, the company has provided a new “update” on the matter, and it doesn’t instill much hope.

Spotify is looking to shake up the podcasting industry yet again, and yet again, not necessarily for the better. The company announced today that it is rolling out new “call-to-action cards” for podcasting ads, which are in-app advertisements correlated to the audio ads you hear in podcasts.

Apple and Google’s car strategy revolves around CarPlay and Android Auto. Is there room for another entrant? Spotify thinks so, and it’s released its Car Thing (yes, that’s the actual name) that can be added onto any car that supports Bluetooth or AUX inputs. I’ve been spending more time using Spotify lately, so I purchased it to compare it to CarPlay. Keep reading to learn more about it.

We’re coming up on one year since Spotify announced its HiFi offering that was slated to launch sometime in 2021. However, with just about a week remaining, Spotify is close to missing that deadline. Meanwhile, Apple Music listeners have been able to enjoy HiFi Lossless audio at no extra cost since June.

By the beginning of December, Spotify released its annual Wrapped feature, showing users everything they listened to through 2021. Once this feature launched, social networks were overwhelmed with screenshots from Spotify users. On the other hand, Apple Music users had to settle down with the same Replay feature that isn’t shareable at all and has been around for a few years.

Since sharing experiences is one of the most important parts of listening to music, would you consider switching to Spotify just for the Wrapped feature?

Now that we’ve officially entered the month of December, the highly anticipated Spotify Wrapped 2021 year-in-review has arrived. Spotify Wrapped recaps all of your top songs, artists, genres, and more — making it easy to see everything about your listening habits for the year. Head below for the details.

We have seen several apps like Instagram and YouTube replicating the TikTok style with a vertical short video feed, and now Spotify is also joining this list. The company has been testing a new feature in its mobile app that basically adds a vertical feed of music videos that users can scroll through to find something they like.

Spotify users are finally receiving another long-awaited feature, which is the ability to easily play an album from beginning to end after the company ditched the default shuffle toggle for Premium subscribers.

Following a widespread outage on multiple websites earlier this week, Spotify is down again for some users. According to reports on social networks, the music streaming platform is partially or completely down right now.

For over a year, Spotify has been testing the Apple Music-style live lyrics feature. After expanding it to the US at the beginning of the year, it’s now being rolled out globally. According to TechCrunch, Spotify will use lyrics provided by Musixmatch to expand its deal and offer live lyrics to users in India, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

After seeing a few reports earlier this year that Spotify was closing in on Apple Podcasts’ listenership, new data allegedly shows that Spotify has eclipsed Apple when it comes to US podcast listeners. If true, it looks like the shift may have happened as early as Q2 this year.

Earlier this year, Spotify launched its first-ever in-vehicle device dubbed “Car Thing.” After six months of invite-only availability, Spotify is now expanding access to Car Thing to US subscribers who want to purchase the $79.99 in-car screen.

Ever since Spotify introduced its own podcast platform, we’ve been seeing the Swedish streaming service surpass Apple Podcasts in some countries. Now, according to an analysis by eMarketer, Spotify is actually close to globally overtaking Apple Podcasts in number of users.

There are, however, some things to keep in mind with this report: subscriber-only channels and shows on Apple Podcasts don’t count towards RSS activity. eMarketer is also somewhat vague with its definition of “users” and doesn’t share clear methodology for some of its data.

Spotify’s ambitions from expanding from primarily a music platform to leveraging podcast and audiobooks are well known. Music royalties are expensive, so it makes sense for Spotify to focus on getting listeners to spend more time listening to content that isn’t as costly to the company. As Spotify seeks to become a destination for all audio content, I spent time using it as my primary podcast player to see how it stacks up compared to apps like Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro, and Player FM.

I’ve been listening to podcasts since 2004, and the industry has grown up a lot during that time in terms of variety, but also in production quality. While most people think of podcasts as non-fiction talk show style, but there is a fast-growing industry fictional storytelling that is rising to the level of being considered a “movie in your ears.” QCODE’s new show, Electric Easy, is quite possibly the highest level of audio production I’ve heard in my life, and it’s worth checking out.

The official ruling from the Epic Games vs. Apple lawsuit in the US has been delivered today and one of Epic’s partners in the Coalition for App Fairness has shared its official statement on the matter. While Spotify is “pleased” with Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ verdict when it comes to anti-competitive practices used by Apple, the streaming audio service says more legislation aimed at Apple “has never been more urgent.”

In another take to differentiate itself from other music streaming services competitors like Apple Music, Spotify announced today a new Enhance feature for playlists. Available exclusively for Premium subscribers, Spotify started rolling out this feature today and says it will help its users get “perfect song recommendations.”