Spotify had their big "not just music anymore" event today in New York, and I've been poking at the new stuff on my phone for the last hour instead of doing literally anything productive. The headline is that Spotify is stuffing video and podcasts into the app now (clips from Comedy Central, ESPN highlight reels, stuff from Vice) plus a feature called Spotify Running that's supposed to match song tempo to your pace while you jog. I want to talk about that last one specifically, because the video thing I honestly dont care about and I suspect most people wont either.
I've been running (badly, three times a week, always with some knee complaint) for about two years now, and I have tried approximately every "smart" running playlist gimmick that's existed in that time. RockMyRun did BPM matching back in like 2012. There's an app called Weav that does live tempo-shifting music, which is a genuinely wild bit of audio engineering when it works. So Spotify Running isnt a new idea, its just Spotify finally noticing that a category exists and deciding to fold it into the main app instead of making you download something separate. Thats actually the good part of this announcement, if you ask me, not the tech, just the consolidation. I dont want six apps open when Im trying to leave the house at 6am.
Whether it actually works is a different question and I havent been able to test it yet since it wasnt live in my app as of this evening. From the demo they showed, it uses your phone's accelerometer to estimate your cadence and picks tracks or adjusts them to roughly match, which sounds nice in theory but every BPM-based running app Ive used has the same problem: it optimizes for a number instead of a mood, and you end up running to seven minutes of a song you dont actually like because it happens to be 172 BPM. Ill believe its good when Ive actually run to it.
The video part is where I get grumpier. Spotify is now hosting original shorts and clips from partners, and theres a whole new "Watch" section sitting right next to your playlists. I get why they're doing it: Wall Street wants growth numbers and "we are a video platform too" is a bigger story than "we stream songs," especially with all the noise around what Apple's supposedly cooking up for their own music service this summer. But I open Spotify because Im doing something else at the time — working, running, cooking, whatever — and the entire value proposition of a music app is that it doesnt need my eyes. The second you ask me to watch a clip youve broken the thing that made the app good. I dont think Im the target user for this part of the redesign and thats fine, but Im skeptical it sticks around in its current form. Companies love announcing they're "more than" the thing they started as, and it usually just means the original thing is about to get worse while they chase the new thing.
Small tangent, unrelated except that its been on my mind: I finally deleted Grooveshark off my phone last week, only to remember they shut the whole service down back in late April after that lawsuit settlement. Havent had a legal streaming habit that stuck since. Spotify's been the default by process of elimination more than genuine loyalty, and announcements like this one are a decent reminder of why, theyre trying a lot of stuff, some of it dumb, but at least the app doesnt feel abandoned.
Anyway. If the Running feature ships to my account this week Ill try to actually log a run with it and report back on whether tempo-matched music is worth anything beyond the pitch deck. My guess right now is its a nice-to-have that I use twice and forget about, same as basically every fitness gimmick before it. The video stuff I expect to just ignore entirely, the same way I ignore the "Browse" tab that's been sitting there unused for two years already.