Spotify held some kind of big to-do in New York yesterday, Terminal 5, if the pictures I saw are right, and rolled out a pile of new stuff that isn't just "here's a playlist." The one that actually got my attention wasn't the video content deals with ESPN and TED talks and whatever else, it's Spotify Running. The pitch is simple enough: the app uses your phone's accelerometer to figure out your running cadence and then serves up music that matches your pace, speeding tracks up or swapping them out as you slow down or speed up.
I want to like this. I really do. I've been running (badly, inconsistently, always in the same beat-up pair of Asics) for about three years now and I've tried basically every "running playlist" gimmick that's come along. Nike+ used to do something sort of like this years ago with tempo playlists you'd pick manually before a run. This is supposedly smarter because it's reactive instead of static.
But here's my problem, and it's a dumb, specific one: my running cadence is all over the place depending on whether I'm going uphill, dodging a guy walking his dog off leash (again, third time this month), or just having a bad lung day. If the algorithm is constantly reshuffling my music to chase a number that's bouncing around by fifteen or twenty steps per minute, I'm going to end up with a playlist that never settles into anything, just a nervous DJ who can't commit to a song. My Fitbit has misread my pace on hills for two years straight and I've just learned to ignore the number entirely. I don't trust a phone in an armband to nail this any better than a wrist strap did.
There's also the licensing math nobody outside the industry ever explains well. Speeding up or slowing down a track to hit a target BPM isn't free in a rights sense, the version of some song playing at 172 BPM at minute twenty-two of your run is technically a different rendering than the one you'd hear normally on shuffle. I have to assume Spotify cleared that in some blanket way with labels rather than song by song, because otherwise this feature launches with maybe a dozen usable tracks and a whole lot of silence.
The video stuff is the part getting more of the headlines, and fine, sure, I get why. Netflix and Apple are both circling the one-app-for-everything territory and Spotify doesn't want to end up as just the music tab on somebody else's phone. But video inside a music app is the kind of feature I mentally file next to Facebook adding a dating section: technically there, rarely opened by me specifically, mentioned in every writeup regardless.
What I keep coming back to is that Spotify's actual product, the plain boring one, the here-is-music-play-it one, still has rough edges nobody's fixed. Offline sync on my phone occasionally just forgets an entire downloaded playlist for no reason I can find, and I've had to redownload the same forty-odd songs at least four times this year. Adding video and cadence-tracking on top of that foundation feels a little like renovating the guest bathroom while the kitchen sink is still dripping onto the floor.
Maybe I'm just the wrong audience for half of this announcement. I'm not the guy who's going to livestream a workout or watch a TED talk mid-jog (if I'm watching anything mid-run it's the sidewalk, so I don't trip on the cracked part by the school). But Spotify Running specifically, the BPM-matching part, is the one feature out of yesterday's announcement I'll actually go try, because unlike the video push it solves something I've personally been annoyed about for three years of mediocre jogs around this neighborhood. I'll report back once it's actually live and not just a keynote demo running on someone's rehearsed phone. Given how these rollouts usually go, that could be a while yet.