Spotify announce ‘New Spotify’, adding videos, broadcasts and more

Spotify have announced major upgrades to their platform during a live-streamed event earlier today.

The service which has streamed over 25 billion hours of music in its seven-year history to date, announced further additions, moving the service further ahead than just its audio background.

First on the new list of additions is the introduction of a ‘new Spotify experience’. Essentially, the experience brings a new playlist feature, allowing users to browse playlists based on the time of day, and current activity (i.e. evening commute, gym time etc). As content is browsed, so does the next iteration of addition come into play – videos, podcasts and broadcasts.

Vice News have already been announced a contributor to the upgraded platform, whilst New Spotify will also bring a host of existing content to the mix too. The likes of Comedy Central’s Broad City will reach the revised platform (short clips, mind, versus full episodes). Other content-providers that were showcased during Spotify’s conference include the BBC, TED, ESPN, NBC, E!, GQ, Vogue and more. Spotify founder Daniel Ek also used the conference to promise exclusive and ‘original content’ will be coming to the platform ‘soon’.

Amongst other changes to the platform included Spotify’s want to ‘rethink running with music’. Obviously understanding how many of the service’s users utilise the audio features whilst in health-mode, the ‘Spotify Running’ element of the app will detect a user’s speed (“Start running to detect tempo” the platform will command). Once a tempo has been detected, Spotify will automatically select a song, relevant to your tastes that also coincides with the speed a user is training at.

The announcement of Spotify’s changes come less than a month until Apple’s expected unveiling of their own Beats/Apple Music streaming service (alongside the expansion of iTunes Radio to more markets). On that note, we’re surprised Spotify failed to utilise the live-streamed announcement to showcase a potential Apple Watch app (presumably that’s in the pipeline, mind).

The updated Spotify app can be downloaded via the iTunes App Store link, below. Initial markets that will receive the new services so far have been confirmed as the US, UK, Sweden and Germany – other territories will follow: