Spotify unveiled “Showcase”, a tool letting artists promote their songs directly on the newly redesigned Home feed of the streaming platform.
With Showcase, artists can create a promotional card for their music, both new and older titles.
This card appears as a sponsored suggestion on users’ mobile Home Screens, the most frequently visited and streamed-from spot on Spotify.
The company highlighted that users exposed to a Showcase promotion are typically six times more inclined to stream the highlighted song.
Artists have the flexibility to personalize these promotional cards with their chosen headings, such as “recent release” or “trending”, ensuring listeners understand the reason behind the promotion. This will appear at the top of the Home Screen on Spotify.
Earlier in the year, at the Stream On event in LA, Spotify had made mention of this feature, along with other artist-centric tools for growth, like the “Marquee” full-screen recommendations and a “Discovery Mode”. The latter lets artists and their teams prioritize specific songs on Spotify.
Spotify has rolled out Showcase initially to artists (and their teams) in the U.S. who have a U.S. billing address and have accumulated at least 1,000 streams monthly over the past 28 days in a designated market.
This tool is set to be more widely available to U.S. artists in the upcoming weeks via the Spotify for Artists dashboard.
The digital music service is witnessing rapid user growth, but not all are opting for paid subscriptions, leading the platform to consider placing song lyrics behind a subscription barrier.
Recently, some free-tier users found lyrics inaccessible, instead receiving a prompt to switch to Spotify Premium to access them.
Spotify spokesperson CJ Stanley mentioned to the Verge that this initiative is merely a trial, with limited roll-out in specific markets
