Spotify Launches Video with ESPN, NBCU, Vice News, Comedy Central and More
MAY 20, 2015 | 08:45AM PT
Todd Spangler

Spotify is branching out from its core streaming-music biz to encompass shortform videos, announcing partners including Disney’s ESPN, ABC, NBCUniversal, Viacom’s Comedy Central, Turner Broadcasting, Conde Nast Entertainment and Vice News.

“We’re a music company at heart,” CEO Daniel Ek said at the company’s press event Wednesday — but it’s now looking to bring those users to video as part of their daily media diet.

The idea is to steer Spotify’s base of music listeners toward video: That will extend the “playlist” of their day in new ways, as Ek put it. But how successfully Spotify can make the leap into video remains unclear.

The new content and features are launching this week for users in the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Sweden, with additional territories to follow, Ek said. Spotify did not indicate whether it’s currently selling video ads for the content it’s licensing.

The privately held company has streamed more than 25 billion hours of music since it launched in 2006, according to Ek. Spotify claims to have more than 15 million subscribers, paying $10 per month, plus more than 60 million active monthly users in 58 markets. Its music catalog includes more than 30 million songs, with 20,000-plus added to the library each day.

Sweden-based Spotify has been criticized for not paying artists fairly for music streamed through its free and premium services. The most notable fracas has been with global superstar Taylor Swift, who yanked her entire catalog from Spotify last year, with her company claiming the singer’s releases would make far more money if they remained off Spotify. Meanwhile, music bigwig Jay-Z last month launched Tidal, a music and video subscription service, arguing that services like Spotify don’t provide a sustainable model for the industry.

With its foray into video, Spotify faces a host of rivals, not least of which is Google’s YouTube, still the 800-pound gorilla in the sector. Other competitors would include social services like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat; Internet-media hubs like Yahoo and AOL; and startups including Vessel, founded by ex-Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, which offers exclusive early access to video content to subscribers.

Spotify video partners include Comedy Central’s “Broad City,” Legendary Entertainment’s Nerdist Industries, Disney’s Maker Studios, Fullscreen, the BBC, TED and Tastemade (which said it will create two original shows for the service).

NBCU’s rollout on the Spotify mobile video platform will include clips from NBC, E! and Esquire Network including segments from “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and “E! News.” The Peacock also recently struck similar deals with Vessel and AOL.

Meanwhile, cable programmer Turner will distribute clips from Adult Swim series, such as “Robot Chicken,” “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and “Rick and Morty” along with video segments from latenight show “Conan” hosted by Conan O’Brien to Spotify users in the U.S.; internationally, Turner will offer full-length episodes of some Adult Swim shows.

The company also announced a new feature, Spotify Running, that provides playlists based on a user’s listening history and running tempo, along with a pact with Nike to integrate the service into the Nike+ app later this summer.

Hey Spotify: Not Every Tech Company Needs to Be Everything

SPOTIFY HAS MADE official its long-rumored plans to become more than a streaming music service. It sounds nice! Streaming video, podcasts, playlists that bend and warp to match your running pace will all pile into the popular app. It’s a huge update—one that signals Spotify is now part of a legion of tech companies determined to become everything to everyone, whether it makes sense for you, them, or anyone at all.

You don’t have to look far for other recent examples. Snapchat adds Discover to strap a content machine on top of its ephemeral messaging app. Facebook absorbs articles by major media companies to create a self-contained mirror Internet. Uber builds self-driving cars to control every aspect of the future of transit. These aren’t pivots, as they say, so much as they are tenuously constructed chimera, features and functions stapled together in an effort to become The One True Internet Experience.

It shouldn’t be surprising that venture-cash-rich companies are making these kinds of land grabs; total dominance has a nice ring to it. But we’ve been through this before. It didn’t work out—not for the companies that tried it, and not for their customers.

Everything Digital Must Converge
The idea of being a one-stop digital shop is nothing novel. The AOL of the 90s remains the most commonly cited example, for its (largely successful, for awhile!) efforts to create an Internet within the Internet. News, messaging, email, commerce, browsing, chat; all of it without leaving the confines of America Online.

Facebook has become the new AOL, for its similar entrapments. But what AOL then, and Facebook and Spotify and Snapchat now (and in a slightly different way, Apple and Google and Amazon) all want to be is what’s typically called a portal, a place that collects the larger web—or parts of it, anyway—in a single place.

That description has always seemed a bit off to me, though; a portal can be an entrance or an exit. It’s maybe more appropriate to compare their aspirations to pitcher plants, those carnivorous flora that invite you inside but make it nearly impossible to leave. Why ditch Spotify to watch video when there are Vice News clips right there? Why leave Facebook for the New York Times when the whole article lives natively in your app? Why experience the world through anything but Snaps?

The potential payoff, if your company can successfully ensnare the bulk of internet users, is astronomical. Which explains why so many startups view all-encompassing expansion as a legitimate strategy; Snapchat’s reportedly valued at $19 billion, while Spotify hovered around $8 billion as recently as last month. Those are large numbers to live up to, even before you consider that neither company appears to have turned a profit yet.

That surely at least in part explains the push for big. But big doesn’t necessarily mean successful—especially for users.

Lonely Islands
There are significant philosophical concerns about what these silos mean for the open web; the whole point of having the entire Internet at your disposal is that there’s no need for a portal or a one-stop shop. And having any one company (or more specifically, that company’s algorithms) dictate what, when, and how millions of people experience the digital world feels at least mildly dystopian.

The more practical problem, though, is that it’s unrealistic to expect any one company to be the best at any one thing, much less everything. Being served Broad City video clips by Spotify is marginally more convenient than switching to YouTube, sure, in the same way that it’s easier to be fed a few raisins than it is to walk to the fridge for a mouthwatering bunch of grapes. Same with getting your news from Snapchat, or getting anything from Facebook.

It’s true that no one is forcing you to limit yourself to any one app. But people are lazy! And even if you’re not, it’s also true that the feature bloat that comes with trying to be everything to everyone causes apps and services that were once very good and streamlined and smart to become a hot mess. The Facebook app in particular became so overstuffed that it had to jettison Messenger altogether.

The result of trying to do so much inevitably turns apps into a Las Vegas buffet experience: unlimited access to a mediocre version of anything you want!

Creating Value, Not Features
Maybe that’s just the way things are now; it’s increasingly hard to find companies that specialize, either digitally or in the real world. Sonos makes a hell of a connected speaker. Evernote offers best-in-class note-keeping. Dropbox syncs files better than anyone. A smattering of headphone and camera companies make great products within their niche. But these are the exception, not the rule. And how long before most of them get absorbed by a monolith, or try to become one themselves?

When today’s aspirational omnivores look for inspiration, they should start with Google. There’s maybe no tech company with more diverse interests, sure, but the thing that drives its profit margins is singular: A full 90 percent of Google’s revenue last year came from ads. It knows what it is, and what it is hasn’t changed since the very beginning. Meanwhile AOL, the original one-stop shop, just got sold for ad tech scraps.

It’s easy to forget, though, when people are shoving hundreds of millions of dollars at you, that new inroads don’t guarantee greater success. Not every company can be everything, especially not after all that venture capital money dries up. Eventually the economy will correct, the bubble will burst, and the companies that have found a way to make money will have a marked advantage over the ones that simply piled on more features.