Spotify Soft-Launches the Infinite Scroll
Yet another app is copying TikTok.
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Six months ago, I sent an email called Every App Is Copying TikTok, Except For The Ones That Should Be.
The premise was simple.
Seemingly every major mobile app has adopted a full-screen, sound-on, infinite scroll viewing mode, except for the ones where this makes the most sense – streaming services.
Netflix seems to care more about disrupting the mobile gaming space.
Hulu is sitting on mountains of stand-up comedy with no organic way to surface it.
Max, Peacock, and Paramount Plus still treat discovery like an afterthought.
Yet somehow, even the NBA app has a “For You Page”.
[Enter: Spotify]
Jack in New York sent me this screen recording last night:
So I opened the app on my end, and explored it for myself:
To access this new feature, make sure the Spotify app is updated, and scroll to the “Music” or “Podcast” tab. Once you find the section with the words “For You”, tap into it, and you’ll enter this new viewing mode.
While it has the skeletons of a traditional FYP, it’s all a bit… off.
AI-generated hashtags.
Horizontal videos in a vertical format.
Lengthy episode descriptions in the place of captions.
Some vague engagement metric on the right-hand side. (Monthly listeners? Downloads? Podcast followers?)
If you read my piece in February about video podcast virality, and the follow-up where the Bill Simmons Podcast took my advice, this is a natural evolution for the app.
They started by strongly encouraging their talent to, “turn the TikTok camera on”.
Apparently they liked what they saw, and now they’re expanding into vertical discovery.
The next step, after mass adoption?
(say it with me)
In-feed advertisements!!!
Remember: despite the rhetoric, this isn’t some noble attempt to help you find your next favorite podcast or album.
It’s about maximizing time spent on the app to attract advertisers.
I certainly didn’t have Spotify in mind when I wrote that article in October, but it makes a lot of sense: they noticed all the video versions of podcasts exploding on YouTube, and wanted in on the action.
If scrolling TikTok is the Gen Z equivalent of channel surfing, Spotify’s attempt here resembles a modern day version of flipping through radio stations.
And if Spotify went this route, there’s no excuse for the streamers not to follow suit.
They own thousands of hours of video content that could be clipped, served, and recommended to their millions of viewers.
You’ll see plenty of this already happening, elsewhere. One need only to browse TikTok or YouTube Shorts for all of 5 minutes to confirm this.
And unlike podcasts, whose hosts tend to, “have a face for radio”, and which were designed from the outset to be audio-only, every single piece of content within the streamers’ catalog is already really good videos. Like, professional grade stuff.
Instead, Netflix et. al still force users to consciously commit to a full episode before they even know if it’s worth watching, and seem to display no understanding of how people actually engage with the mobile apps on their phones.
Spotify has no TV shows. No movies. No original stand-up specials.
But they’ve beaten the streamers to the punch, albeit with a slightly awkward V1.
:(