Spotify has been taking to the its soapbox today to announce some triumphs and upgrades to the music streaming service that are coming our way; first up the company has announced that they have doubled their active users over the course of the last year by gaining a further 10 million active users.
This means Spotify has a whopping 20 million users; 5 million of which are paying subscribers to the Spotify Premium service. This goes to show that the expansion the company made into the US a year ago was a huge success with Spotify fast becoming the largest streaming platform in the US.
Another stat thrown about was the fact that over one billion playlists have been created (sadly 4.7 million of those are simply entitled “Love”), but with this massive success Spotify is also looking to move forward with the service.
As such the company has announced a new set of features for its player which brings a host of changes and some major functionality updates. First up is a feature called ‘Collections’ which is a way to manage all the music you listen to often by saving said music into a collection instead of setting up a Playlist.
Also new is a discover tab which will deliver new content via a recommendation engine, which whilst offering you music based on your choices will also offer bios, reviews and other information to explain why such a recommendation was offered.
And last but not least, there is a new feature called “Follow” which builds on Spotify’s social networking aspects by allowing you to ‘follow’ someone with similar music tastes as you and to then see what tracks they are listening to. This can be done with anyone on Spotify so you don’t have to limit your “follows” to just friends as you can follow anyone using the system.
Additionally the “Follow” feature will also have push notification settings that will allow you to send updates to friends when new albums or songs they might like arrive on Spotify.
All in all it’s been a great year for Spotify and with the announcement of these new features (and a major new musical addition in the form of Metallica!) will hopefully see the service grow some more and it will continue to change the way music is listened to!