👨🏻‍🎨 Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

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Happy Monday everyone!

If you’re reading this, it’s pretty obvious that you’re an Internet native 🤖

Data suggests that Global Internet Traffic is roughly around 5.3 Billion users, with the top platforms as below taking the lion’s share 👇🏻

While this includes only ‘Social Media’ platforms & excludes search engines like Google- boasting of 1 Billion plus monthly active users; the one common factor for every platform is that they have an ‘Atomic Unit’ which drives traction.

What does an atomic unit mean? Following are some of the platforms we use on a daily basis & their atomic units👇🏻

🎬 YouTube- Long & Short-Form Videos

💬 WhatsApp- Text Messages

📲 TikTok- Short-Form Videos

📸 Snapchat- Self-Deleting Pictures

🎞 Instagram- Pictures & Short-Form Videos

Basically, the atomic unit is the unique piece of information/content around which a platform is structured & which drives usage on a consistent basis.

Whether it’s viewing videos on YouTube, sharing pictures which delete themselves on SnapChat or consuming & creating short-form videos on TikTok, without this fundamental atomic unit, these apps would have no value.

So what is the atomic unit for music streaming platforms like Spotify or Apple Music?

You’d naturally say songs but come to think of it- it’s actually playlists which drive music discovery on Spotify, especially their wildly popular ones such as ‘Discover Weekly’ which we’ve covered on here previously

However, all that seems to be changing this week, as Spotify announced a bunch of product changes, which fundamentally shifts how users discover music.

What exactly is this change?

Instead of the cluttered tile based feed that you see on Spotify which includes different playlists personalised according to every user’s taste, Spotify is making it’s feed more lively & interactive with a TikTok styled short-form video + audio, which takes up majority of the app screen as below 👇🏻

Instead of the usual tiles for playlists, Spotify’s change brings the home feed to life with a TikTok styled Video+Audio frame that autoplays until you swipe

How exactly is it different?

When you open Spotify, you’ll still see a bunch of album and playlist covers at the top, but below that you might see an autoplaying video podcast, which you can view further with a tap. Or you might see a big, Instagram-style photo meant to tell you a little more about a playlist you might like.

At the top, if you tap on “Music” or “Podcasts & Shows,” you’ll be taken into a vertically scrolling feed that looks a lot more like Instagram Stories or TikTok than the Spotify you’re used to, dedicated to just that section of Spotify.

You can flip through as many as you like, each one autoplaying to give you a sense of what it is, or tap on one to dive in and save or explore it further.

Here’s a longish video of Spotify’s CTO Gustav Soderstrom laying out how this exactly works 👇🏻

https://youtu.be/eyTXQHiKeW8

Basically, it shifts the ‘Atomic Unit’ of Spotify away from playlists towards individual songs & more specifically ‘content’ in general as Spotify transitions away from just being a music to audio app, with it’s huge investments in Podcasts & Audiobooks.

Twitter shitposter & investor Tuner Novak breaks down this shift in the atomic unit of Spotify really well in this thread.

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What Does The Internet Think Of It? 🤔

Social Media can be really critical & divisive, but when Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced this feature at their Stream On event in LA this week, people didn’t wait long to start roasting Spotify for its changes ❌

While a lot of people took to Twitter to announce switching over to Apple Music, & some even claiming that Spotify is running out of ideas & doomed as a company to copy TikTok, I personally think it misses the point entirely.

I came across this really interesting piece from 2016 called ‘The Audacity Of Copying Well by Ben Thompson, which gives a history lesson of Tech companies copying products.

While it was written just when Instagram famously copied Snapchat to release ‘Stories’ on their platform, the blog outlines how companies mess up when copying competitors & what can make it go right.

The first mistake most incumbents make when building new products in response to threatening new competitors is to attempt to win on features.

When Google launched their Facebook competitor in 2011 they touted features like Circles to organize your friends, Sparks to find content to share, and Hangouts to video chat. These made Google+ “better” and “differentiated”, which is another way of saying more complicated; meanwhile the most important feature — your friends — was nowhere to be found.

The problem with focusing on features as a means of differentiation is that nothing happens in a vacuum: category-defining products by definition get a lot of the user experience right from the beginning, and the parts that aren’t perfect — like Facebook’s sharing settings or the iPhone’s icon-based UI — become the standard anyways simply because everyone gets used to them.

Since launching stories in 2016, Instagram has blown apart Snapchat in terms of user growth

Basically, trying to copy your competitor by building ‘different features’ confuses customers, & cloning an existing hit feature into your network is much better strategy.

Just like how Instagram didn’t re-invent the wheel or launch a different app for ‘Stories’ back in 2016, it simply added a tab on top of the user’s feed, & leveraged its existing network of users to not have to go to SnapChat to upload temporary pictures.

And as predicted by Ben back in 2016, it really did work.

Instagram ate up market share & while SnapChat is still pretty huge, it’s nowhere close to Instagram & stories played a crucial role in maintaining it this way.

Our Take On This?

Pablo Picasso famously once joked that ‘Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal’- a saying endorsed by the likes of Steve Jobs as well.

As far as Spotify’s ‘Copy’ of TikTok’s feed is concerned, I think despite all the backlash from users, will ultimately succeed- if for no one else but Spotify.

This is because Spotify is no longer a music company (if it ever was).

The transition from music to all audio content in general, means that it needs to keep finding innovative ways to surface podcasts & audiobooks to their users & not hide them away within the confines of tile shaped playlists.

Also, we’ve seen from TikTok’s massive success that a vertical swiped based feed with autoplaying content is much more effective in monetising their platform, as it gives a better indication of a user’s preference for a particular piece of content & helps improve the recommendation algorithm, with more space to display Ads.

However, these changes might not necessarily be the greatest thing ever for artists, as Spotify is trying to claim. While their mission statement officially says:

“Giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art”

The truth is that artists will now have to not only try & hack the new feed of Spotify (as if trying to go viral on TikTok wasn’t enough) & make sure they appear on the ‘Home Feed’ of users, but also compete for screen time with other creators such as Podcasters & Audiobook authors.

Among the other announcements by Spotify, they officially released their AI DJ called ‘X’ — that talks to users & gives commentary around music, & Discovery Mode- which incentivises artists to give away a greater % of their already peanut sized royalties, in exchange for higher visibility on the home feed of Spotify.

With the new feed, paying artists lesser royalties in exchange for greater visibility on the feed sounds great if you’re Spotify

I’ve covered Discovery Mode & its controversy previously, but with the new feed of Spotify it all makes sense why they launched it.

What’s the solution?

I don’t know about you but I could do without another platform becoming like TikTok. While it makes sense for Spotify itself, it’s clear that neither users nor artists are thrilled about the new changes.

The artist-fan relationship is getting further abstracted away with the new feed & the AI DJ shaping what user’s listen to on the platform. With Spotify paying artists lesser in order to appear more on user’s home feed, this sounds like straight up exploitation of the scale of their network.

Which is what we at Incentify, are building to change 🛠

Our platform will enable artists to control distribution & monetisation of their music via ‘Clubs’; & give users an alternative to discovering music shoved down their throats by biased recommendation algorithms 🤖

If you’re an iOS user & want to peek under the hood of what our app looks like, leave a comment!

P.S- Our Instagram Page just hit 10k followers & we’d love for you to join the party!

Have a good week everyone 💪🏻

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Originally published at https://incentify.substack.com on March 13, 2023.