Have you ever checked out your favorite artist on Spotify and noticed one of those looping videos playing in the background? Although, not every artist has a looping video. But, this might be changing very soon. The service that provides the looping videos for Spotify, Canvas, is launching into beta.
Why is this so exciting? Artists soon will have the ability to load their own video content for their songs (yes you can turn this feature off too). From the Spotify Artist blog regarding this exciting update:
When you have the option to enhance any and every one of your songs with a unique moving image, the creative possibilities for storytelling, context, world-building, and audience outreach are enormous—you can give your listeners using the Spotify mobile app a richer experience than ever before by connecting them in a whole new way.
Concerns with More Video Content on Spotify
For sure this is very exciting news for artists alike. This feature, once launched, will definitely enhance quality content. However, what are the negative impacts? First off, over saturation. Imagine clicking every single track on your favorite playlist, and every song pulls up a random video? That would be incredibly annoying. Second: data? Does Spotify really expect everyone to simply be okay with increasing data costs for loading 1000x videos? With only 3- to 8-second clips, it won’t be overwhelming, but still. I could also foresee issues with monitoring the quality, and safety of the content. Imagine thousands of artists loading videos and having to monitor those to fit into the safety guidelines of Spotify. That’ll be interesting.
All in all, this is an exciting move for Spotify. Providing artists with these clips will enhance the overall experience of the app, and will give more control to the artists. I mean, isn’t that what Spotify should be about in the first place?
