Over the past year or two, Spotify has been at the helm of an impressive turnaround. After years of financial losses, the music streamer took steps to expand its scope, embrace new AI technology, and offer more playlist features. Now, a new playlist feature directly targets its music streaming competitors.
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Spotify’s Competitive Streak
Besides typical pricing readjustments, Spotify’s main focus has been on offering more features that set it apart from the other music streaming services. We’ve covered elements of this in the past, like their ‘daylists’ that algorithmically track listening habits and create song lists based on mood.
The other noteworthy expansion was their audiobook library, which helped them add new subscription packages and justify pricing tweaks. They clearly realized that, for many online services, offering more than competitors was key to survival. Spotify was already the king of music streaming, so they had to make a lateral move into audiobooks.
You see this move with other competing services online – quantity is good, but variety is even better. It’s why casino sites have hundreds of different slots, but also other games too. Do that enough, and better than competitors, and the site builds a larger audience because it’s made up of people who play slots but also people who play the other games, and some who like both.
That’s what Spotify has done with its audiobook tier. Most subscribe for the music, some for the books, but both help their bottom line and sweeten a premium deal. At the time, it was widely acknowledged that this was Spotify challenging Amazon, which had started doubling down on their Amazon Music service not long beforehand.
Import Your Music
Now Spotify’s newest competitive feature is Import Your Music, which is exactly what it sounds like. Mobile app users now have the option to pull their playlist data from other music streaming services and place them onto Spotify instead, seamlessly. The tool used is actually TuneMyMusic, a third-party service that makes playlist transfers easy, but now it’s accessible directly from Spotify’s app. It’s a global launch, so users anywhere can use it with unlimited transfers, and it’s found under the ‘Your Library’ tab.
This isn’t the first shot across the bow; Spotify is following YouTube Music and Apple Music’s examples. This summer, both services launched a playlist import feature, and as the one to beat, Spotify was naturally included as an export option.
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Spotify’s version of the feature can take playlist data from Apple Music, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music, plus SoundCloud, Deezer, Pandora, and Tidal. It’s a straight rip, so the playlists don’t get changed in any way. Once settled in, the playlists will also synergize with Spotify’s personalization algorithms. That means it feeds into ‘daylists’, the Release Radar, and other AI-powered playlist features. If somebody wants to give the algorithm a crash course in what they’re into, this gives newcomers a quick, handy way of doing it.
This feature is clearly aimed at the sunk cost crowd, who didn’t hop services due to their pre-existing playlists. As the music streaming services continue to duke it out and justify raising subscription prices, we can expect more competitive features that try to poach each other’s audience.
