Spotify announced a major overhaul to its popular music and podcast streaming app at its Stream On event in March. If you’re on Android or iOS, you may have seen some of these changes over the past few weeks. 

The company has over 500 million active users and they don’t just listen to music, podcasts, and audiobooks; Spotify also has a range of tools for artists, podcasters, and creators. The audiobooks feature is not available in South Africa. 

User updates 

You probably noticed that your Spotify home feed looks a lot different now, resembling TikTok and Instagram Stories. The user experience is more about scrolling and tapping the larger multimedia tabs on your feed so you can see previews before following an artist.  

You can view content vertically as you would on Instagram stories to get previews from bands. Spotify wants users to connect with artists “more deeply” and believes by sharing videos and more interactive features, a user is more likely to follow them. 

Similarly, podcast discovery is also now a major focus as it was previously notoriously difficult to find new content. The home feed now plays snippets of a podcast so you can decide to follow the creator or not. 

Spotify says its recommendations drive close to half of all users’ streams and when listeners decide to follow a creator, they listen to, on average, five times more of their music.  

Other new user features include a smart shuffle to discover new artists and autoplay for podcasts. 

Creator updates 

Spotify is also paying more attention to creators and announced an app called Spotify for Podcasters. All of this stemmed from when Spotify bought Anchor a few years ago, which was the place to go for podcasting.  

It offers podcast creator tools for anyone new to the creator world. It’s described as a one-stop shop to create, manage, grow, and monetise podcast content.  

One of its unique features is a video podcasting option for creators, and interactive episodes. All features are free to the creator. 

The platform also allows users to make money through a partnership with Patreon, which lets users run their own subscription model. 

This partnership allows creators to publish Patreon-only content directly on the Spotify app. It will work for users who linked their Patreon account to Spotify, which will then be able to access the paid content. The user can then listen to all podcasts at one destination. 

Last month marked the fifth anniversary of Spotify in South Africa. To date, Mzansi has spent more than 24 billion hours on the platform and local artists have added more than 1 million tracks to it. 

Start streaming with Vodacom fibre and data bundles 

The streaming market continues to thrive in South Africa thanks to products like Vodacom Fibre and mobile connectivity. Don’t forget to buy Vodacom data bundles before you fire up your favourite streaming app. The bigger the bundle, the cheaper it is.