A few weeks ago, Spotify held their Stream On event - a virtual (this year) round-up event where they broke down in-depth the upcoming features and changes of the product. While I'll be highlighting Spotify Clips, a few other notable mentions are the upcoming include
- HiFi sound quality update
- the expansion of their Radar playlist
- enrolling the Canvas feature to all artists
- market and language expansion
- and enabling Discovery Mode which will allow prioritization of releases in the listener's Discover Weekly / Release Radar playlists.
What are Spotify Clips?
From a product standpoint, Spotify Clips isn't a novelty feature. The credit of the concept itself should go to Snapchat which (I think?) debuted the feature. The swipe-able temporary content eventually expanded into Instagram Stories, and somehow inspired the way TikTok works. All the data out there shows nothing, but a positive product impact after introducing this feature, so it wasn't that surprising hearing about LinkedIn adopting the same feature.
If you want to fully understand the impact of Stories on user behavior and what aspects of the feature make it one of the most engaging features in social media ever, I highly recommend checking out Analyzing Factors Influencing Behavior Intention to Use Snapchat and Instagram Stories - a research paper by Vincent Valiant and Johan Setiawan.
For Spotify, however, that's something new on the table and opens up a lot more possibilities.
In their essence, clips are bite-sized and temporary pieces of visual content that allows artists to shed additional light on their art and personality thus engage even further with their audience... or maybe attract new ones. And all of that is happening in Spotify's ecosystem - on their playlists.
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The Clips feature is a tool that enables artists to create a personal and emotional connection with listeners. Something which should have an impact on conversion rate - whether that's increased playlist engagement, higher streams per listener, or increased followers for the artists.
While everyone is currently talking mostly about behind-the-scenes, experience from other platforms shows that people can be very creative with this ephemeral type of content.
Why are Spotify Clips a Pure Win?
The Spotify product is evolving not only in terms of content with the rapid expansion into Podcasting but in terms of features and usability. They not only create content but are an essential part of your waking up, breakfast, showering, driving, <insert activity>, and are progressively making it easier to connect to most of the devices around you at any given time.
The product already attracts millions of people to their app every day and the one goal ahead of the product team is to constantly increase engagement. Given the track record of the Stories/Clips feature, it is a no-brainer to enable artists to communicate better with fans in their own ecosystem. Something that has been discussed for years now. Why send people to artists' other social media platforms when you can host that conversation or at least interact in your own product?
In addition, if all metrics go up it's a win for both artists and the product itself.
How Do Spotify Clips Work?
Initially, I thought the feature would be available through Spotify for Artists (S4A), but from what I've found so far -that won't be the case. Needless to say - normal listeners will not be able to create Clips, a huge difference between how the feature works on any other platform.
It is yet to be 100% confirmed who and how will have access to Clips and how does a playlist qualify for it, but I saw a few examples on LinkedIn, so I thought of sharing them here.
This screenshot comes from Ezgi Canerli (label & artist manager at Spotify) on LinkedIn and it's a showcase of how they used the feature on their Türkçe Pop playlist.
We asked artists to give us a secret about their latest songs in the Turkce Pop playlist. Fans can now hear these untold stories by watching Spotify Clips on the mobile app!
We as a label willl definitely keep a close eye on the feature as it does sound quite exciting and a must-try tool for everyone working in the industry.
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