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The popular music-streaming service has added recommendations, follow lists and much more.
(Credit: Spotify)
Spotify has globally launched a number of new “personal” features on the service, with New York hosting the main launch event and Australia got its own smaller one in Sydney.
The Discover Tab is a new feature that lets you view music recommendations based on your play history. You’ll also be able to get music suggestions from artists and other people you follow.
Yes, follow, which is another new feature. Users can follow artists, media, friends, even celebrities and other “influencers”, and see what they’re listening to in real time.
The New Collection feature is also something users have been wanting for a while now. You can drop whole albums or individual tracks into your collection and then listen to them later — they’ll even be flagged as unheard if you’ve never got around to playing them.
These new features, along with a few others, will be rolled out to users in the coming weeks via updates for both desktop and mobile applications.
At the New York launch, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek also gave out a few rare figures from the service. While the service has 20 million users, Ek noted that Spotify now has five million paying subscribers worldwide, with one million from the US alone. Ek also said that Spotify has paid US$500 million to music rights holders, with 70 per cent of all money made going back to the artists and publishers.
Locally, Spotify was equally cagey on giving out numbers, but managing director Kate Vale said that, taken together, Australia and New Zealand was the most successful launch region for Spotify.
