Spotify is shutting down Spotify Stations, its light-weight music streaming app, on Might 16, in accordance with emails being despatched out to customers.
The email is being shared across Twitter which explains each the standalone app and web-based participant will not perform. In actual fact, Spotify isn’t even ready till Might 16 to start shutting down Stations because the app has already been delisted from the Google Play Retailer and the Apple App Retailer.
Spotify’s e mail goes on to make clear that the music stations will migrate over to the primary app and recommends you progress your favorites over.
Completed experiment
We reached out to Spotify to ask why it was discontinuing Stations. Merely put, it was an “experiment” that ran its course. A Spotify spokesperson informed TechRadar in an announcement, “At Spotify, we routinely conduct a variety of experiments to create higher listening experiences for our customers. A few of these assessments find yourself paving the best way for our broader person expertise and others serve solely as an necessary studying. Our Spotify Stations Beta was a type of assessments.”
Spotify Stations first launched in January 2018 and it was just about the service’s model of Pandora. It had all kinds of stations based mostly on completely different genres, artists, or moods. You had nearly no management over what you have been listening to other than fundamental curation options like favoriting songs.
The response from Spotify customers has been overwhelmingly unfavorable but resigned. Commenters within the Spotify subreddit are dissatisfied Stations goes away as a result of they loved the stripped-down person interface. The UI took you straight to the music with out having to navigate by means of menus. Some mentioned it was an effective way to search out new music whereas others admitted it was slightly wonky. The audio high quality was unhealthy and also you couldn’t add a track to playlists on the bottom app.
Consolidating apps
With the discontinuation of Spotify Stations, there seems to be the beginning of a brand new pattern amongst tech giants to consolidate their providers beneath one roof relatively than having a bunch of various apps. Spotify has already accomplished one thing comparable with the combination of its Greenroom function into its major app, now rebranded as Spotify Reside.
YouTube is doing one thing comparable by eliminating its light-weight YouTube Go app. It was deemed as “pointless” and inspired outdated customers to get the primary app. It’ll be fascinating to see if different providers comply with the identical path. It might be nice to have only one light-weight app with a ton of options as a substitute of getting a number of.
