Tag: Spotify

All Spotify Users in the U.S. Can Now Play Podcasts through Amazon Alexa

To date, Spotify users have been able to ask Amazon Alexa to play music, like their Discover Weekly or Today’s Top Hits playlists, but not podcasts. But for U.S. Amazon Alexa customers, that changes today. Now, Spotify Free and Premium users in the U.S. will be able to ask Alexa to play their favorite podcasts as well.

First, make sure to set Spotify as your default podcast and music provider in your Alexa settings. Then, all you have to do is call out, “Alexa, play The Joe Budden Podcast on Spotify,” or whatever podcast you want, to start enjoying podcasts on your Spotify account. It’s a seamless way to listen to your favorite podcasts, no hands needed.

In addition to requesting a specific podcast, users will be able to ask to restart an episode and pick up from where they left off in their Spotify app with Alexa just by saying, “Alexa, play the [podcast name] podcast. They can also request the latest episode, navigate to the previous or next episode, and even navigate by podcast time frame.

Try playing some of these new podcasts with your Alexa device: 

Ready to get started? All you have to do is ask.

Learn even more about listening to your favorite podcasts on Alexa here.

Caribou’s Dan Snaith on New Music, Discovery, and Spotify’s Altar Playlist

Many electronic producers double as DJs, and most DJs also produce, but Dan Snaith is more versatile than most. Since 2001, the music he makes as Caribou has set a high standard for melodic, propulsive, sonically adventurous indie dance. Then there’s Caribou the live act, which expands Snaith’s studio material for a full band—not just interpreting the songs, but radically transforming them. Finally, Snaith moonlights as Daphni, turning out sleek funk and disco edits for his famously wide-ranging DJ sets.

The sweep of Snaith’s output, spanning home-listening faves and underground club heaters alike, makes him a fitting figure to spotlight as Spotify relaunches its Altar playlist. Dedicated to alternative electronic music and club culture —spanning house, bass, techno, downtempo, and just about every conceivable permutation thereof—Altar reflects the kinds of sounds that Snaith spent nearly 20 years pioneering.

This February, Snaith will release Suddenly, the first new Caribou album in more than five years. The first single, “Home,” dropped in October, and the second single, “You and I,” earlier this month. When For the Record reached Dan Snaith at his studio in London, he was working on preparations for the band’s upcoming tour. “It’s all starting to become real,” he said. “It’s been so long that I’m just so excited to get it going again.”

We spoke with Snaith about his creative process, his upcoming album, and the state of electronic music right now.

“Home,” the first single from the forthcoming Caribou album, almost sounds like it could be a Daphni song. How do those two projects inform each other?

There are definitely some Caribou tracks that almost could have been Daphni tracks, like “Bowls” on Swim or “Mars” on Our Love. It’s kind of magnetic: Sometimes there’s an attraction; sometimes it’s the opposite. After the Daphni album in 2017 was when I really started making this new Caribou record in earnest. It was like, okay, now I can have more all-encompassing tracks that explore harmony or lyrics, whereas Daphni is specifically about making music that’s club-focused. “Home” kind of sits apart from a lot of the other stuff on the record, actually. There are things that are reminiscent of Daphni, but I think there’s a lot that’s quite far away from that world as well. 

With Caribou, are you gathering pieces of songs before you actually sit down to make the album in earnest, or are you starting from scratch?

I’m gathering pieces all the time. I’ll have a verse for a year and then eventually I come up with a chorus, or some switch gets flipped and another piece of the song comes together. There are some loops on the new record that existed even before Our Love was finished. I sit down in the studio every day and I make four or five 30-second-long loops, little ideas. So if you think about how long I’ve been making this record, now I’ve got a playlist with 900 ideas in it. Then it’s this editing process, funneling things down over a long period of time, to get minutes of music out of hours and hours and hours of stuff. Which sounds torturous, and sometimes it is, but that’s the thing that I most enjoy, starting from nothing and making some kind of idea. 

Let’s talk about the state of electronic music. What sounds are you particularly excited about right now?

When I started in the early 2000s, the idea of somebody in experimental electronic music working on a Timbaland or a Neptunes record seemed totally absurd. Currently, there’s a much closer connection between experimental electronic music and the mainstream. It’s kind of hard to draw a boundary anymore. Now everything is electronic music, in a technical sense. Everybody’s recording on the same tools, whether you’re making a Taylor Swift record or a Skee Mask record.

That said, there have been times when I felt like I understood where the momentum in the electronic music world was. In 2008, 2009, living in London, meeting people like Floating Points, Joy Orbison, the Hessle Audio guys, it was like, wow, there’s something really exciting and focused happening. It was easy to feed off that energy. Now, it doesn’t feel like there’s a central narrative, but what’s exciting about what’s happening is that there are many more diverse voices in electronic music than there used to be 10 or 15 years ago. 

It’s been a while since any significant new genres have emerged. Do you sense anything new on the horizon?

When I was in high school, I heard jungle for the first time, and I couldn’t even wrap my head around it. I haven’t had that shock-of-the-new feeling for a long time. I hear individual producers with new ideas, but not something so completely new as a genre that it allows for a whole world to jump out of it. Presumably that will happen again. 

It sometimes seems like there’s so much electronic music out there now that there isn’t the chance for consensus to build.

I feel like people are waiting for it. Everybody is talking about what a big tune that Overmono track “Le Tigre” is. Now that the Caribou album is done, I’m excited to get out there and be playing, but I’m also sneakily going to start thinking about making club music again, because I’ll be out there doing shows, maybe I’ll play at the occasional after-party. It’s moments like that that get me geared up like, “Okay, I gotta make something that, like, bangs in a club.”

You’ve been around since the days of actual physical crate-digging in record stores, and a lot of the music you make as Daphni is rooted in sampling rarities. How has streaming changed the way you discover music?

I think I’ve learned about more new and exciting music digitally than I did when I was mostly digging through dusty piles of records, although I think there’s still room for both things. As a music fan, how can it not be wonderful that the entire history of recorded music is available to everybody at all times? As somebody who grew up in small-town Canada finding it difficult to get my hands on records, I’ve met young people over the past decade or so that have a remarkably eclectic and encyclopedic knowledge of music and music history. If they want to learn it, it’s all available to them. 

You know, I’ve got this 1,000-plus-song playlist called “The Longest Mixtape.” Apart from my own music, the one thing that I have to share with people is that I’ve spent my whole life digging, finding obscure and popular music that for me has something special about it, some magic. And I thought, if I could put all those things in one place for people to listen to, this is something that’s possible now and was never possible before.

Are you a fan of Altar? 

Yeah! With a playlist like Altar, you go there knowing it represents a certain type of music that you’re interested in and discover things you don’t know. I also like the fact that it’s occasionally curated by other people. You look at it and see, oh, Peggy Gou or somebody has picked a bunch of stuff that she’s into at the moment. That idea of having guest curators seems like a really interesting way of sharing people’s personal tastes within a palette where you know roughly what to expect.

Is there anything that you want to say about your album?

I’m just so excited for people to hear this album in full. People have heard the first two singles, but I feel like it’s a real album album. There’s so much diverse stuff sitting there together that I hope coheres in a kind of narrative throughout. It’s something I’ve lived with for so long. Actually, the other day, a friend of mine came over, and I’ve listened to it a zillion times, obviously, but he was like, “Can I just listen to it the whole way through?” I was like, Okay, here goes, I gotta listen to this one more time. And it was the first time that I heard it as a listener. You know, you get so wrapped up in the details, like, the minutiae of mixing and mastering. I hadn’t listened to it for a month or so. And I sat down and listened to it with him, and it was reassuring. I thought, this is something that I can be proud of.

Check out Caribou’s latest single, “You and I,” on Altar.

Spotify Celebrates Women in the Music Business in Australia

Allies: Bring One, Be One, Meet Many. That was the theme of the inclusive Spotify gathering held on Monday, November 25, to celebrate women in the Australian music business.

Hosted ahead of the ARIA Music Awards in Australia (a pivotal industry and cultural moment for the country), the event was an opportunity to bring together and celebrate the achievements of women in music, as well as recognize important support from their allies.

Your Daily Podcasts Playlist Makes Finding Your Next Favorite Show Easier Than Ever

You’ve just binged your favorite podcast and you’re finally caught up. But now you have to wait an entire week until the next episode. Now what? With so many great podcasts on Spotify, it can be hard to know what to listen to next. Thanks to our latest personalized playlist, it’s now easier than ever. 

Spotify transformed music discovery with playlists like Discover Weekly and Daily Mix. Now we’ve created Your Daily Podcasts—our first daily personalized podcast playlist that gives users an easy way to discover new shows while also keeping up with old favorites. If you’ve listened to at least four podcasts in the past 90 days, you’ll find the playlist in the “Your Top Podcasts” shelf on Home or in the “Made For You” hub on browse.

Here’s how Your Daily Podcasts works:

  1. Spotify’s algorithms analyze your podcast behavior—like recent streams and follows.
  2. Then, based on your listening history and the podcast type, we’ll recommend the next best episodes for you.
  3. That might be the next sequential episode in a podcast you’re already listening to (think Dog Tales and How’s Work with Esther Perel), a recent stand-alone evergreen episode in another show (maybe Amy Schumer Presents: 3 Girls 1 Keith or Certified Buckets), or a timely episode from a daily updating podcast (like Horoscope Today or The Journal).  
  4. Don’t worry—no spoilers here! If you’ve never listened to a story-driven sequential show we think you’d like, you’ll get the trailer or pilot episode first—to see if it catches your eye (er, ear).

Free and Premium users in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Sweden, Mexico, Brazil, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand can check out their Your Daily Podcasts playlist, now available on Spotify.

Stream Your Favorite TV and Movie Anime Songs with Spotify’s New Japanese Anime Hub

For years, anime television shows and movies like Attack on Titan and NARUTO have been making their way from Japan to TVs around the globe. Over time, the Japanese animation style has become known not only for its visual aesthetic, but also for the rich audio experience behind the medium. And for some, the music is just as important to the culture of anime as the animation itself.

These days, thanks in part to the availability of anime on Spotify in over 20 Spotify playlists, the music behind anime hits is experiencing its own surge in streaming. What’s more, the classical, J-Rock, and J-Pop musicians behind some of the genre’s beloved theme songs have also seen an increase in their stream counts.

To continue to raise the volume on the genre, we recently launched our new Anime Hub. Now fans in Japan, the U.S., Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands, Brazil, Mexico, India, South Africa, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, and the 13 regions in MENA can find and stream anime music more quickly and easily than ever.

Since the hub launched on October 8, fans in the U.S., Japan, Brazil, Indonesia, and Mexico have streamed anime music the most, with about 25,000 daily active users streaming playlists inspired by Attack on Titan, My Hero Academia, and Tokyo Ghoul. Plus, four new playlists—Genesis of Aquarion, Kantai Collection, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, and CARDCAPTOR SAKURA—have recently come to Spotify from Victor Entertainment’s Flying Dog label, known for its rich categories of anime-related music. This adds over 1,300 anime-related tracks to Spotify, including theme songs and an original soundtrack album for Genesis of Aquarion mainly composed by Yoko Kanno.

Spotify Lists on NYSE as SPOT

This post was originally published on April 2.

Tomorrow, Spotify becomes a listed public company on the New York Stock Exchange. And it feels like the right time to pause and acknowledge the thousands of Spotify employees around the globe who helped build out the Spotify ecosystem while staying true to who we are and what we believe. You make me proud to come in and learn and work alongside all of you.

Lots of people have asked me how I feel about tomorrow’s listing. Of course, I am proud of what we’ve built over the last decade. But what’s even more important to me is that tomorrow does not become the most important day for Spotify.

It’s the day after, and the following day that matters — and all those days to come. Because that’s when we will continue the hard and important work of our mission: To unlock the potential of human creativity — by giving a million creative artists the opportunity to live off their art and billions of fans the opportunity to enjoy and be inspired by it.

Spotify is not raising capital, and our shareholders and employees have been free to buy and sell our stock for years. So while tomorrow puts us on a bigger stage, it doesn’t change who we are, what we are about, or how we operate.

This is why we are doing things a little differently.

Normally, companies ring bells. Normally, companies spend their day doing interviews on the trading floor touting why their stock is a good investment. Normally, companies don’t pursue a direct listing. While I appreciate that this path makes sense for most, Spotify has never been a normal kind of company. As I mentioned during our Investor Day, our focus isn’t on the initial splash. Instead, we will be working on trying to build, plan, and imagine for the long term.

Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we stumble. The constant is that we believe we are still early in our journey and we have room to learn and grow.

I have no doubt that there will be ups and downs as we continue to innovate and establish new capabilities. Nothing ever happens in a straight line — the past ten years have certainly taught me that. My job is to ensure that we keep our foot on the pedal during the ups, so that we don’t become complacent, and that we continue to stay the course with a firm grip on the wheel during the downs.

We have a lot to do — we are only in the second inning — and I’m more excited than ever for the future.

Remember, tomorrow is just another day in our journey to fulfill our mission.

Harder, better, faster, stronger.

Daniel

 

Spotify has filed a registration statement (including a prospectus) with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) relating to its ordinary shares. Before you invest, you should read the prospectus in that registration statement and other documents Spotify has filed with the SEC for more complete information about Spotify and its ordinary shares. You may obtain these documents for free by visiting EDGAR on the SEC web site at www.sec.gov. The registration statement relating to Spotify’s ordinary shares was declared effective by the SEC. This communication shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to the registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such jurisdiction.