Spotify has been engaged on a brand new design for its dwelling tab that may create separate feeds in your music and your podcasts. The corporate says it’s a part of an effort to offer you extra and better suggestions, however it additionally addresses a typical criticism of the Spotify expertise: with each sort of audio smushed collectively within the app, it may well generally be onerous to work out.
The brand new dwelling feed, which is rolling out now for Android customers and is coming to iOS “within the close to future,” truly doesn’t look that totally different at first look. However up on the prime of the display screen are two new buttons: one for Music and one for Podcasts & Reveals. Tapping a kind of will take you into separate feeds. Music will present you strategies based mostly on what you’ve been listening to, whereas Podcasts & Reveals will floor the newest episodes of your favourite reveals plus suggestions for brand spanking new ones. They’re not a lot new dwelling screens as new filters in your dwelling display screen. (I’d fairly simply have them be separate tabs altogether, however I’ll take what I can get.)
The change seems significantly helpful for podcast listeners, because it turns Spotify into one thing a lot nearer to an precise podcast app. It’s been oddly troublesome till now to simply open Spotify and discover a podcast to hear to; Spotify largely selected to intermingle podcasts and music, relegating your podcast feed to a playlist referred to as “New Episodes.” The corporate appears to be endlessly redesigning its Library web page, however the dwelling display screen has stayed largely the identical lately.
Now podcasts are way more entrance and middle, which is a win for listeners but in addition a sign of how vital podcasts are to Spotify. As the corporate seems desperately for methods to become profitable from audio, it has invested closely in turning into the largest podcasting participant in the marketplace. It’s making an enormous push into video, too, which additionally figures to be the form of function that wants a devoted area within the app. (And let’s not even get into audiobooks, that are a complete totally different form of audio product and can be even more durable to combine into Spotify.)
A part of Spotify’s entire plan to dominate audio has been to carry every thing — from music to books to podcasts to stay audio — all right into a single place. That’s a difficult UI downside, and one the corporate hasn’t at all times gotten proper. On this case, it seems like giving issues their very own area is the fitting name. And it provides Spotify tons and plenty of new methods to strive to get you listening to Joe Rogan and the remainder of its pods.