Spotify - likes vs saves?

Why change likes to saves?

@BRANDONVHIXON

Apr 07, 2023

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Why change likes to saves? 📰
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Likes vs Saves?

While more symbolic than substantive, the move from likes to saves signals an internal initiative towards: how much you listen to or save for later.

Spotify’s co-president Gustav explains the move towards retention as:

“We’re doing something very different, where we’re not optimizing for time spent in the feed, but for how much you listen to or save for later. This may sound a little bit like a cop-out, but it’s actually true. First of all, we’re mostly a subscription business, so we make money from retention, and you get retention when people listen to these long things. We make money when someone later listens to that song and there is an ad in between that and the next song.”

It’s a move from what has the highest click through rate (CTR) and overall popularity score at the moment, to what will keep users subscribed for the long term. This makes sense given 90% of Spotify’s revenues have been (historically) tied to premium subscriptions.

The shift from “likes to “saves” is also a move towards owning discovery.

For the past two years, the music business has been breaking records on TikTok through influencer marketing juggernauts like Creed Media, Songfluencer, and VRTCL. With a probable ban on the horizon, Spotify would like to fill the discovery vacuum that TikTok will ultimately create.

Gustav explained:

“The way we thought about it internally is that TikTok and YouTube are actually symbiotic. Most of the foreground discovery has happened there, but fortunately for us, so far and still, we get almost all the background listening from that discovery. It trickles down to us. We feel now is the time where you should also be able to discover on Spotify.”

This is an interesting admission from Gustav, as critics have long made the argument that editorial playlists are great for breaking songs and terrible for developing new artists.

Discovery is Spotify’s achilles heel.

(We suggest this is by design, as Spotify would like to monopolize the connection between artist and fan. Marquee and discovery mode are two such examples.)

We live in a paradigm where most consumers are familiar with the songs on playlists like “Internet People” or “fit check”, but couldn’t tell you much about the artist. Many editorial playlists are simply background music for the average listener working from home.

INR