In the wake of the Spotify Daylist phenomena and its short-form video features, many Spotify users have spotted another new video feature that lets you quickly preview albums in the Spotify app – making the album listening experience less time consuming.
The new feature is a short-form video feed which allows you to vertically scroll through an album in chronological order. It can be found on an artist’s profile page and also the vast majority of albums on Spotify, located under the album cover and next to the download icon and three-dot menu.
As well as a looped Canvas visual, a 30-second snippet of each song will play to accompany the video, displaying up to three hashtags that contextualize each song’s vibe and genre. The feature seems to be designed to condense album listening into a quick and snappy experience with more short-form video elements coming to the app. Tell us you’re trying to be TikTok without telling us, Spotify.
While we wait for Spotify to get back to us with an official announcement, the feature has been cropping up in the app for many users (including us). According to a post in the r/truespotify Reddit forum, it seems that the preview feature (below) is out for testing on selected Spotify accounts.
The feature experience may vary for some users, and we’ve noticed it appearing in different forms for us at TechRadar. While some might have full access to the feature when viewing albums, singles, and artist profiles, others are only able to access it in the latter.
At the moment, we don’t know which regions it’s being tested in, the operating systems it’s compatible with, or when it will be widely rolled out, but we'll update this story when we hear back from Spotify.
Analysis: The album's swansong?
I first noticed the feature a few days ago and thought it was just another step in the TikTokification of Spotify, but experimenting with it has opened my eyes to its benefits and potential pitfalls.
There’s no doubt that the preview feature can save you a shedload of time when listening to an album. Particularly in the age of streaming, it’s easy to fall into the trap of skipping to the middle of a song to sample an artist’s music before fully committing to a thorough listening session.
Therefore, if you’re not a fan of sitting through an entire body of work then you could use the feature to compress your total listening time and help you to quickly determine if you’re going to like an album or not.
While the feature could be great for its convenience, fans of traditional albums might be less keen. I'm an avid music fan who loves to listen to full-length albums in their entirety, so hopefully this doesn't become Spotify's default listening experience.
After all, 30 seconds isn’t a lot of time to see a song’s full potential and the preview feature doesn’t allow you to experience the segues between songs in an album. It could take us further into a worrying territory where it becomes common to quickly dismiss music after a short first-time listen.
Still, I'm certainly not writing off the feature and, while it's frustrating to see Spotify bring more TikTok elements to the app instead of improving audio quality, it’s another niche addition that has the potential to please a lot of Spotify fans.
