Spotify Testing Its Own Iteration Of Stories During The Holidays

After some version of a ‘stories’ feature has made its way to most of the major social networks, it looks as though streaming will be getting in on the action this holiday season, with Spotify set to roll out its own version of stories for artists.

Guest post by Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0

The Stories feature is a big hit on multiple social networks and it looks like Spotify is now rolling out its own version. In what is acknowledged as a test, the company unveiled a Christmas Hits story (see the image above) featuring a slew of Holiday songs.

If Stories are fully rolled out in the future (no guarantee of that) it could be an opportunity for artists to grow their audiences. In-app time has gone up on other platforms as a result of the feature, and it could be a place for artists to display exclusive content so that fans get to know them better.

That said, stories will only be enabled for artists, labels and curators in an effort to decrease the clutter that comes when the feature is available platform-wide.

Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and even LinkedIn now provide a story feature, for better or worse. Every company has seen the desired increase in metrics by introducing the feature as people constantly come back to see the latest post before it expires.

For artists, there is a downside to Stories as well. The feature is most successful when it feels authentic, so if a third party is mechanically driving the posts, it’s possible that story implementation might have the opposite desired effect. There’s also the possibility that Spotify will also open it up to a new ad format, which is probably the intent all along.

Another potential downside is creator fatigue, since Stories is yet another series of posts that has to be made beside on all the other platforms as well.

As stated before, the implementation of Stories is no sure thing as Spotify views its current few as merely a test. Artists and labels seem split on whether it will be useful or not, as some see it as just more marketing work. We probably won’t know how it shakes out until early in 2021.