Spotify has given its application a great makeover, with a focus on improving the experience of its paid subscribers. The company has simplified the navigation of the application by reducing the number of buttons and has renewed its Search page, which now incorporates elements that are previously in "Explore", such as favorite genres or music to match a state of cheer up. And it has also given a new design to its Radio service, with the addition of new and easy to use playlists from Radio de artista.
The most immediate change is the navigation of the application.
Spotify has always felt a bit crowded, with its five navigation buttons: Home, Search, Search, Radio and My Library. The new application has reduced this to just three buttons: Home, Search and My Library.
The recommendations will appear on the Start page, after the update, while the discovery is based on Search.
The Search page allows you to search for artists, albums, and podcasts by writing queries, as before. But now the page is also personalized, showing its own "Main genres" under the search bar, such as R & B, Rock, Hip-Hop, Kids & Family, or anything else that you listen to. This is useful because the tastes of users can change over time or they can share their individual Spotify account with others (instead of opting for a family plan), which can distort their recommendations.
The "Browse" section has been moved to this Search page in the redesign, and points to things like the lists of successes, the programmed playlists of Spotify, your own personalized playlists, plus music by mood, gender, activity and more. 19659002] The Radio section also received a review.
With the update, you can search for a favorite artist or song, and then start listing on one of Artist Radio's new playlists. These are endless and personalized sequences based on your own tastes, and are updated regularly to stay fresh, Spotify notes.
This last feature seems to address a recent challenge of Pandora, which took advantage of its musical genome to create dozens of personalized playlists for its users. Spotify, effectively, is now also converting its radio stations into custom playlists. Instead of asking users to approve their selections up or down, they will only create the stations they know they will like, based on the data they already have. These radio playlists also work offline, says the company.
The updated application for Premium users follows a redesign of the application for its free customers, which was announced in April. That redesign made it easier for free users to access more than a dozen playlists with songs on demand, which also included the option to skip tracks. It also reduced the number of tabs in the lower navigation.
This week, the company also launched a new Android Wear app. In addition, the external manufacturer Mighty released a new version of its Spotify player, which is basically a device similar to iPod Shuffle that works with Spotify instead of Apple Music or iTunes.
Changes in the Spotify application occur at a time when the company is losing ground in North America to Apple. Pandora was kidnapped by Sirius XM for $ 3.5 billion, which could also increase competition in the United States.
Spotify premium subscribers increased to 83 million in the second quarter of 2018, and have 180 million monthly assets, including free customers. , which still places it ahead of the competition, in terms of user base size.
Spotify says that the redesign of Spotify Premium is being extended to all Premium subscribers on iOS and Android worldwide today.