Balancing User & Business Value: Spotify’s Notification Feed️
⏱️ 1-Minute Recap:
- Social networking applications have long grappled with balancing business and user value to increase user engagement ️
- Facebook’s “Time Spent” metric prioritised business value over user value in the long-run
- Notification feeds are a tool employed by social applications to increase engagement
- In July 2021, Spotify launched a “What’s New” feed for mobile app users
- Unlike Facebook, Spotify recognises engagement can’t be coerced to generate business value
- Spotify’s notification feed allows it to increase retention through engagement and grow its creator market
- Spotify’s notification feed drives high engagement with a good user experience through unobtrusive and contextual notifications
🔔 Business vs. User Value: Notification Bells and Feeds
In a Q2 2013 earnings call, Facebook announced their adoption of the “time spent per person” metric. Instead of optimising for user value, Facebook injected effort into reinforcing behaviours which increase time spent to increase revenue-generating opportunities. However, as users began scrutinising Facebook for trust issues, the company steered away from the “Time Spent” metric because it was an inaccurate measurement of user value. Social applications like Facebook have long grappled with balancing business and user value to increase user engagement.
Notification feeds are a tool employed by social applications to increase engagement. Facebook’s home feed, for example, is cluttered with attention-grabbing red dots and bells to alert users to important updates. Notifications can easily become mind-numbing if presented without context or purpose.
So, is it possible to build a notification experience that is user-centric? Spotify’s notification feed shows it‘s possible to utilise notifications to deliver a good user experience with high engagement.
✨ Introducing Spotify’s ‘What’s New’ Feed
In July 2021, Spotify launched a “What’s New” feed for mobile app users under the homepage’s new notification bell. The feed delivers updates on new releases from artists and podcasts which users follow. When new content is released, blue dot indicators appear on the notification bell.
Spotify released the notification bell to help users sort through the platform’s 50,000+ daily uploads and keep track of relevant releases. The list is easily accessible through the home page and filters for music and podcasts.
💸 The Business Case for Spotify’s “What’s New” Feed
We are in the discovery business. Every day, fans from around the world trust our brand to guide them to music and entertainment that they would never have discovered on their own. If discovery drives delight, and delight drives engagement, and engagement drives discovery, we believe Spotify wins and so do our users.
— Spotify Annual Financial Report 2020
Spotify turned listening, a traditionally passive experience, into an active one by allowing users to seamlessly discover artists and songs on its platform. Discovery drives user delight and user delight drives engagement. When we find our new favourite artist through the Discover Weekly playlist, we get excited about our discovery and explore the artist’s albums, follow the artist, and maybe even attend their offline listening event.
In the financial report, Spotify notes engagement is a consequence of user delight and drives business value. Unlike Facebook, Spotify recognises engagement or time spent metrics can’t be coerced. Facebook and Spotify have fundamentally different approaches to growing engagements.
In 2013, Facebook assumed that:
Spotify assumes that:
Spotify recognises that the long-term business value is created by optimising for user delight. They view the modern-day consumer as an empowered technology user, who has grown vigilant of companies prioritising their bottom line over user value. Instead of assuming they can monopolise a user’s time, Spotify recognises that users are intentional with their use of technology.
So, how would a user-centric notification feed actually deliver business value? Notification news feeds drive mobile-app engagement, which reduces the likelihood of churn. Users who use Spotify across mobile and desktop devices are proven to be less likely to churn.
A notification feed also opens a gateway to delivering other updates important to the user, and thereby increasing engagement. Spotify, for example, may explore releasing user and creator-related notifications. Also, given the notification feed is valuable for users, it would incentivise users to follow more artists we enjoy, thereby feeding data into Spotify’s recommendation algorithms.
It also strengthens Spotify’s competitive position in the music-streaming industry. Spotify holds a 34% market share against its competitors Apple Music (21%) and Amazon Music (15%). Spotify is reported to have 2x higher engagement than its competitors. Spotify maintains its competitive position by increasing retention and reducing churn. In the listening-space, retention is driven by engagement, which can be generated by the newly released notification feed.
Finally, the notification feed, which in the long-run will provide creators with tools to promote their new releases, helps Spotify grow its creator market. Although Spotify has a larger subscriber base, Apple offers significantly higher royalties than Spotify. In November 2020, Spotify began testing a service which would help artists promote their music. Creating a notification feed allows Spotify to experiment with promoting creators’ new releases. However, Spotify needs to tread carefully after 2018, when it was accused of “stuffing Drake down users throats” by promoting his music for advertising cash. A notification news feed should promote new releases in a meaningful and intentional way for users.
⚡ How Spotify drives high engagement with a good user experience
If you compare Spotify’s notification feed with Facebook’s, it’s functionality and attention-grabbing efficacy wouldn’t compare. The notification bell is not visually prominent on the homepage. When clicked on, the feed itself lacks functionality, only giving users basic filtering capabilities, and restricting users from directly playing music through the feed. Because the two feeds are different is exactly why Spotify’s works. Spotify is reimagining a notoriously troublesome and mind-numbing feature.
The notification bell and its blue dot indicator is unobtrusive on the homepage. The visual priority of the homepage still remains the playlist and music discovery cards. Users don’t feel coerced to engage with notifications.
The feed itself is also purposeful. It’s exactly what it claims to be, a “What’s New” feed. Instead of delivering social updates about user relationships with other users or creators, the updates are valuable and intentional. The “What’s New” feed is a natural extension of Spotify’s “New Releases” playlists and cards. Prior to launching the notification feed, Spotify was able to validate that a “What’s New” notification was user-centric through the existing playlists and cards. The feed is built to be un-addictive, separating new and previously viewed updates with “New” and “Earlier” headlines.
The “What’s New” feed is valuable to users only because we have discovered and followed creators on Spotify. Instead of receiving irrelevant and incessant updates, we engage with artists we love in a valuable and intentional way.
