Spotify is the latest platform to test ‘Stories’ that will allow influencers to post short-form videos to the top of their public playlists, according to TechCrunch. The test went live with lifestyle and beauty creator Summer McKeen, who is known for curating playlists and sharing them with her Spotify fans that include 2.33 million YouTube subscribers and 126,455 Spotify followers. The feature is designed for influencers to spotlight their favourite content, which is what McKeen is doing to introduce a playlist of her all-time favourite songs. Similarly, just like other Stories formats on social platforms, Spotify Stories will appear above the playlist title and comprise short video clips that users can tap on to move to the next video. The focus of the Stories will, of course, be the music. With this, influencers will be able to include snippets of their chosen track and the album art as a way of previewing what songs are included in a playlist. Users will see an animated preview of the video you’ll see if you view the Story. McKeen is the first to trial the feature but Spotify plans to roll it out with other music and lifestyle influencers in the near future. Currently, those that are testing the feature are being chosen depending on a variety of factors including the likes of follower count, how engaged their followers are and how active the influencer is on the music platform. Stories have certainly been a winning feature for other platforms. Take Instagram Stories, for example, which has 400 million monthly active users. Instagram users can already add Spotify songs directly to their Instagram Stories, however, unlike other Stories features on social platforms, Spotify hopes its new feature will encourage fans to engage with Spotify and support music discovery for users. The feature isn’t available for artists themselves. A Spotify spokesperson told TechCrunch “At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve our user experience. Some of those tests end up paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning.”
