Good developers borrow. Great developers steal. And the most successful developers take whatever’s trending and jam it into their apps. That’s how the quote goes, right?
In any case, Spotify is the latest big app to hop on the short-form vertical video trend sparked by TikTok, following in YouTube, Instagram and Facebook’s footsteps. The music and podcast streaming app is currently testing the feature, called ‘Discover’ with a small handful of users.
Spotify ‘Discovers’ the TikTok trend
To be fair, Discover isn’t so much a TikTok lookalike as it is a Spotify-themed spin on the TikTok formula. According to TechCrunch, the feature presents vertical snippets of music videos that users can scroll through and like, which also adds them to their ‘Liked Songs’ playlist. They can also tap the menu icon to bring up a song’s information. Testers can find the Discover feed on the Spotify navigation bar between the Home and Search tabs.
The feature is apparently found in a Spotify iOS beta build, called TestFlight. Spotify told TechCrunch that Discover is still in the very early stages of testing, ad there’s as much chance of it never seeing a full release as there is that it does. Even if it does get shelved, Spotify says it could pave the way for a similar feature in future.
“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 way for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning,” the company states.