Spotify is close to being the ultimate music experience. However, with a tweak to one of its services, it could become the music space. How?
As of now, Spotify has become my go to place for listening and discovering music in general. With Discover Weekly, Spotify Radio, great UX and the vast amount of music offered, there's no competitor. Though, I can't help but to feel offline when using Spotify. By that I mean not connected to the outside world. So I turn to the radio: most often the Swedish Radio in order to listen to news, small-talk and discussion. But I don't stay for to long because I can't control the music myself (my taste doesn't fall in line with the broad mainstream).
Well... why not combine the two into one? A radio service (in spotify) where I can connect my own music library, yet still listen to a radio announcer? There's two ways I see this working:
The first option is that the user has to connect his library of music in which an algorithm can find serveral songs of different lengths in order to pick songs of similar lenghts across all users. I.e, let's say the radio announcer will talk for 3 minutes, have a music break of 5, then talk for 3 minutes again. The algorithm knows this and picks a different song for each user, but they are all 5 minutes long. This makes it so the announcer is always live.
The second way would be to make it semi-live. So the user listening can have any length of a song played during the broadcast, but have the announcer recorded and queued up after the song is played. This would obviously be the easiest option, and to the broad masses, completely fine.
As for the radio hosting, Spotify can either broadcast themselves or outsource it to the Swedish Radio or example. The radio show is recorded in real time and formatted into a song, then played in the radio service in Spotify via either option one or two described above.
This way I can listen to my own music, but still be up to affairs as to what is going on in the outside world. I would honestly only use Spotify is this was the case.
Got any improvements? Hit me up. Has this been proposed before? (then sorry!) Should there even be a chat alongside the radio so people can interact? Maybe, who knows! Instead of calling it Live radio, why not honor Daft Punk and call it: Radio Alive?
Anyways, cheerios!
Staff / Moderator/ 2 years ago in Social & Random