Spotify Increasing Access To Local Music
To be able to provide music to users from their own country or region, Spotify first invests time and money in understanding local artists and music preferences. This is particularly important as Spotify’s own research buy spotify saves shows that national preferences for local music have increased over the last five years. While this could, of course, be partly the result of streaming services like Spotify increasing access to local music, it also means that users now expect to be able to listen to local music when they open a streaming app. For Spotify, this means creating regional teams to carry out the necessary research to discover what local users want.
For example, the regional India launch team spent time at concerts, at parties and just chatting with people around the country, which helped them understand that many listeners in India wanted to connect with music that others were listening to through the platform, and did not want to just listen to their own music. This resulted in the development of “Sound of City” playlists when Spotify launched in India in 2019, which track trending songs in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Chennai. The team also realised that many listeners in India liked to stream songs from their favourite Bollywood, Tollywood, Kollywood and Punjabi actors, resulting in the 2019 India launch also including a series of “Starring…” playlists full of these songs.
By researching local music, not only can Spotify satisfy local users by tailoring the platform to their wants and needs, but it also continues to maintain the two-sided approach to music streaming that gave the platform so much success in the first place. Users see Spotify as a chance to discover local music and music that they will like, while artists see it as an opportunity to grow globally as their music will be shared on playlists and discovered by people all around the world. For example, the Discover Weekly playlists, which anyone who uses Spotify will be familiar with, allow users to find new music regularly through a playlist based on their preferred genre and artists. Here we can see the “Think Global, Act Local” slogan come to life once again.
