Well, look at that: Spotify launches video

NEW YORK -- Spotify is changing its tune -- from "listen up" to "look here."

In a move to appeal more broadly to consumers, the Sweden-based music service showed off new features Wednesday including video, podcasts and specialized experiences for people like runners.

During the event, Rochelle King, Spotify's vice president of design and user experience, demoed a carousel of playlists that will be tailored to particular members on a new "Now" start page, including video clips from Vice News, Viacom's Comedy Central and Nerdist News. Spotify's main catalog of songs will be interspersed with these clips as well as podcast spoken-word tracks.

"There were a lot of times when people wanted to use Spotify but had to leave it to come back for five minutes or 10 minutes of entertainment," Chief Executive Daniel Ek said in an interview. "View this step as how we expand music to more places in your life."

Adding video and other types of content could encourage people to spend more time using Spotify and, in the process, generate more advertising revenue. That could help the company keep a tier that's free for you. But it also means that Spotify's format -- a monthly subscription that gives members unlimited access to songs -- will become more complicated for mainstream consumers to understand.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek says a new update makes the service "more accessible, personal and usable than anything in music."Screenshot by CNET

The move also repositions Spotify before Apple launches its own subscription service based on Beats Music, part of its $3 billion purchase last year of headphone maker Beats. Apple is expected to relaunch the subscription service next month at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference.

Spotify is the biggest service of its kind by listeners, but its rapid growth has been matched by ballooning losses -- 162 million euros last year, or more than $180 million. Part of the reason is most of its users remain on its free, ad-supported tier rather than subscribing for $10 a month, which generates more revenue per user. Digital video could make the ad-supported free service more profitable. Prized by advertisers for how it commands viewers' attention, digital video saw ad spending more than double on mobile devices and jump 38 percent on desktop computers in the US last year, according to researcher eMarketer.

Spotify already has video ads. By including videos people theoretically want to watch, the company can better ensure that people are actually watching the commercials, rather then simply hearing them as the service plays in the background.

However, making Spotify a source for more diverse entertainment risks confusing consumers unfamiliar with the new model of charging a monthly $10 subscription for all the music they want to hear. Spotify identifies its core users as tech savvy early adopters and people who are dogged music fans -- but that leaves a wide swath of mainstream consumers untapped. Will those potential new customers be confused about what they're being asked to pay for if Spotify has comedy clips from Comedy Central shows and news segments from Vice News?

Ek said the new features work toward Spotify's goal of offering a more personalized experience. "Maybe you won't watch the comedy clip, but we will learn that, and we will take it away from you if it's in the way for you," he said.

Apple's entrance into subscription music, which it resisted for years, has the potential to both harm and help rivals like Spotify. Apple will become an intimidating direct competitor, with a globally recognized brand and an established relationship with music buyers worldwide through its years as the primary purveyor of digital downloads through iTunes. Yet one of the most difficult challenges for upstarts like Spotify has been educating mainstream consumers about what a subscription music service is; Apple launching such a product will go a long way toward informing the masses about this model.

Also on Wednesday, Spotify unveiled other new features, including one designed to find soundtracks for people out on a run, based on their gait, as determined by motion sensors in their smartphone.

The new Now experience will begin rolling out Wednesday to iPhone users in the US, UK, Germany and Sweden, with more markets and platforms to follow in the near future. Spotify Running will start rolling out to iPhone users globally Wednesday.

Spotify closes in on $8.4 billion valuation with latest deal

Spotify's popular streaming service is raking in the big bucks.Spotify

Spotify's valuation is shooting up the charts.

The music streaming service for mobile devices and desktops is on the brink of raising $400 million, according to recent reports that cite unnamed sources, a figure that would value the privately held Spotify at about $8 billion.

Spotify declined to comment.Wealth management firm Goldman Sachs and state-sponsored backers out of Abu Dhabi are two alleged investors. They're likely joined by other similar investment firms. The fundraising round is expected to solidify in the coming weeks.

The influx of funds would ratchet Spotfiy higher on the list of billion-dollar tech startups, which also includes Dropbox at $10 billion, AirBNB at $20 billion, Snapchat at $15 billion, and both Uber and Chinese phone-maker Xiaomi in the $40 billion range.

Spotify, first launched in 2008, now has 60 million active users worldwide, 15 million of which are paid subscribers.

Though more financially successful than rivals like Pandora, Spotify could face pressure if Jay-Z's Tidal streaming service, which promises lossless audio quality, seduces enough fans. Madonna, Coldplay, Rihanna, Kanye West, Beyonce and Taylor Swift are all Tidal backers.

The Best New Features in Spotify’s Big Redesign

Well, look who got a makeover.

Spotify revealed a slick, redesigned platform for its mobile and desktop apps Wednesday. Along with the new, darker look comes a list of improved features that Spotify says will help listeners more easily organize and discover music.

The updated design will arrive on the Spotify website, desktop player, and iPhone app for all listeners in the coming days.  

Spotify, for newcomers, is a music streaming service that gives you on-demand access to over 20 million songs across multiple devices in exchange for a monthly fee or audio ads. 

This is Spotify’s first redesign since it launched in 2008, which is kind of like 50 years in Internet time. According to director of product development Michelle Kadir, Spotify spent several months testing the new look with a select group of its subscribers.

“We sat down with our users and watched them use it,” Kadir told Yahoo Tech. “We asked them to use metaphors to describe it. Someone said, ‘It feels like I’m in a BMW.’ ”

OK, a luxury sports car it is not. But the new version is without a doubt a great improvement on a product that many have come to use for their daily listening needs.

Take our hand as we guide you through Spotify’s newest features.

Navigate more easilySpotify’s new design is much more understated than the aging gray Winamp knockoff we were operating before. It features simplified display screens, curved buttons and icons, oversized Helvetica lettering, and responsive gray shading that pops every time you run your cursor over art. Where there was once scarcely an image or a legible string of text on our desktop players, there’s now bright splashy album artwork and titles.

The most obvious change of all, however, is the color: It’s all black,everything. After surveying Spotify listeners, Kadir said her team found that people wanted a more immersive experience. Having a bright glowing computer in a dark room might take away from, not add to, a listener’s experience. And so Spotify painted it black. 

Save music fasterUp until now, if you wanted to set aside an album, you were forced to save it to a collection of playlists. That could sometimes result in a cluttered music selection when you were on the go and looking for something to listen to real quick. The new Spotify separates playlists from your regular music collection, allowing you to save any song or album you dig with a feature called Your Music.

This organizational tool, which lives in the left column of your web player above your playlists, automatically organizes whatever music you choose to save in your catalog. To store an album, you’ll need to click the Save button that’s featured next to a record (as you can see below).

To save songs, you’ll have to click the + next to the track, which you can find to the right of a song …

… or in the bottom-right corner of the artwork in the Now Playingbox on the left of your player. (Use Fiona Apple’s single arrow tear to guide you.)

Once a track or album is saved, it’s automatically filtered into a separate library, which you can sort or search by artist, title, recently added tracks, or recently played tracks. 

To the amateur music collector, the Your Music feature might seem repetitive. Why create a whole separate drawer when you could have everything in one easy-to-access stream bin? But if you’ve spent your past life thumbing through rows of CDs at Tower Records, a separate spot for your favorite recordings offers the illusion that you’re building a tangible music collection. You’ve put time into jumping from genre to genre, and you want to feel like that work has paid off. Not to mention, because Spotify offers a lot of remastered or edited versions of tracks, saving just the right version or year of a song is often clutch for hardcore fans.

Find music for your moodIn many ways, Spotify is lagging in the race to offer you the most personalized music suggestions. Earlier this year, Dr. Dre’s Beats streaming service made a splash with a platform that analyzed its subscribers’ past music collection, age, and gender to offer up ultra-tailored song recommendations. Another streaming service, Songza, just partnered with The Weather Company to fine-tune its suggestions based on subscribers’ local forecasts.

Now Spotify has revamped its Browse section to suggest music based on the time of day and country.

So if it’s before 7 a.m. on a weekday, for example, a playlist inBrowse might give you a soundtrack for your dreary morning rituals. These compilations, however cool they sound in concept, are not always pulled off as elegantly as you might hope. Tuesday’s April Fools’ compilation, for example, was literally just a list of songs that contained the word “fool” in the title. 

Though the Browse feature isn’t quite as all-knowing or precise as others, Kadir says that it does learn your preferences over time.

“The more we know about the user’s likes and dislikes, the more fine-tuned the playlist,” she said.  

And that, my friend, is the new Spotify in a nutshell. The updated design and features will roll out gradually to everyone’s desktop, iPhone apps, and web players starting Wednesday. Happy listening.