Newsletter 
Spotify is easily one of the top contenders for best streaming music service, but like everything Spotify has to continue evolving to keep the interest of users as the world of technology evolves around them. Just last month, Spotify links were made sharable through Facebook’s Messenger chat application on mobile devices making it that much easier to send links from songs you like to friends and family who you think might also appreciate the song. Back in February, Spotify Connect support came to Amazon Echo so that users could more easily stream their Spotify playlists by using only their voices to ask Alexa to play a song. Now it looks like Spotify may be looking into adding features related to photo and video, specifically photos and videos from events, as they have just acquired CrowdAlbum.
CrowdAlbum has been around for the last few years and deals with aggregating photos and videos from events from an artist’s performance, having worked with over 1,000 artists as well as venue partners in the U.S. since 2013. With these photo and video albums, any artist could look back at their tour and event history to connect with fans. Now artists will be able to do the same thing within Spotify. What products the two teams have in mind have not yet been made public, but the goal of the acquisition is to help better serve artists and assist them in making connections with fans so they can also monetize their audience.
CrowAlbum will join the team at Spotify who is responsible or the recently added Concerts and Fan Insights features, both meant to strengthen the bond between artists and fan, as Concerts was designed to help an artist promote their shows to relevant fans and the Fan Insights feature was designed to help artists gain a better understanding of their listeners through the Spotify service. There’s no doubt that Spotify will be looking to establish more ways for artists to connect with listeners, but the CrowdAlbum team could also help integrate more social features for listeners themselves with photos and videos that were taken by fans at events.