This morning, Spotify is holding an event in New York City, ahead of Apple’s WWDC where many believe the company will relaunch Beats Music after they bought Beats not too long ago. Spotify has a few announcements today including a new redesign, but what really caught our eye is the fact they are bringing podcasts to the app. This means you’ll be able to listen to The Android Headlines Show from the same app that you stream your music from. Pretty sweet.
According to TheNextWeb, the podcasts will be mixed in with playlists in the app’s new discovery timeline view. The discovery timeline recommends new songs to you as well as playlists, videos and podcasts. These recommendations change based on your listening habits and the time of day. Sorta like how Google Play Music’s recommendations – powered by Songza – changes based on the time of day.
Spotify unveiled their new goal of finding the perfect content to accompany every moment of your day. The company’s CEO Daniel Ek said his company is going to be taking a “massive leap forward” today that “goes beyond conventional formats.” Additionally, the company has showcased a number of new features in the new version of Spotify. In addition to the podcasts and new discovery timeline we mentioned above, they are also bringing video. The video section is named “video capsule” and it offers streaming video from partners like Comedy Central, Vice and The Nerdist. There’s likely to be plenty more on the way as well.
Since Spotify started, they have streamed over 25 billion hours of music. That’s quite a bit. Adding in video and podcasts will drastically increase that number, as that brings in much more content and will likely get users to use the app a bit more. So far the company has yet to turn a profit, even though they bring in a ton of revenue – that’s likely due to the record labels actually. Hopefully adding in video and podcasts will help out with that.
The Spotify event is still going, so we’ll update this as more announcements are made.