Spotify mobile app to get biggest ever redesign

App will aim to copy TikTok and YouTube – even as users complain it has lost its way from music

(Antony Jones/Getty Images for Sp)

Spotify has launched its biggest redesign ever, adding a new feed that borrows from TikTok and YouTube to encourage people to scroll through the app.

The changes come amid an increasing move from Spotify away from the traditional collections of songs and albums that it launched with, and into new kinds of content such as podcasts. That move has faced some criticism from users.

But Spotify has appeared to move further away from that traditional collection of music, with a scrollable feed that is more similar to a social network than a music library.

Spotify said that the “next generation of listeners” prefer to try audio out before “fully diving in”. As such, the home feed will offer snippets of music to people, such as recommendations, that they can try out before actually listening to fully.

Those recommendations will come in video and audio forms and will be personalised, Spotify said. Users can navigate through them towards more traditional ways of listening to music, such as playing through an album or saving it into the library.

“Thanks to both of these new feeds of visual clips, you can scroll purposefully through music, podcast, and audiobook previews until you find something you like,” the company said in its announcement.

The new update follows other recently introduced features aimed at making it easier to find new music. They include a new AI-powered DJ feature, which will play a personalised selection of music – and use artificial intelligence tools to both generate dialogue between the songs, and speak it out.

Spotify said that feature had already worked to keep people on the app for longer. When users listen to the DJ, they spend 25 per cent of their listening time with it, and more than half come back the next day, Spotify said.