The ‘TikTokification’ Of Everything Needs to Stop
The ‘TikTokification’ Of Everything Needs to Stop
Spotify is the latest company to copy TikTok — but at what cost?
If you can’t beat them, join them.
This phrase appropriately describes the tech industry over the last five years. Innovation has been drying up, replaced by frenzied copying and maniac desperation to implement the current trend into a product, regardless of whether it makes sense to do so.
The king of copying has been Meta, with its Copy-Acquire-Kill approach. The company has also been the king of failing, with most of its imitations performing miserably before being quietly swept under the rug.
I bring up Meta not to dunk (okay, a little) but because there is a valuable lesson in its fumbling strategy — users don’t want their apps and products stuffed full of identical features.
I guess Spotify didn’t get the memo.
It will come as no surprise that the current trend is TikTok. Or rather, it’s the short-form video with infinite scroll format that the platform has revolutionized. And, because it gets users addicted and keeps eyeballs engaged with effectiveness not seen since peak Instagram, everyone wants a piece of that pie.
Despite pushback from creators and power users, Meta has been turning Instagram into a TikTok clone. The company even declared it’s “no longer a photo-sharing app or a square photo-sharing app.” Snapchat added a similar feature called Spotlight. YouTube went all in on its ‘Shorts’ feature.
If it weren’t enough to have all the platforms you (once) loved slowly morph into the same, tiresome experience, the ‘TikTokification’ trend is spilling out beyond social media — and into our music players.
In its recent Stream On event, Spotify revealed that it too will borrow (read: steal) from TikTok, with an update to its feed that will prioritize video content. The new feed is heavy on imagery and, yes, vertical scrolling, turning your home screen into something that much more closely resembles TikTok and Instagram. Yaaaaaayyyy.
What is the main reason Spotify has made this change?
Its podcast dilemma.
The company has made huge investments into podcasts over the last few years, spending billions to sign exclusivity deals with the likes of Joe Rogan and the Call Her Daddy podcast and to buy up entire podcast studios like Gimlet Media. In 2021, Spotify announced it had made $215 million in podcast revenues. In 2022, ad revenue was an estimated $449 million. Yet despite this, it still posted a fourth-quarter loss of €270million last year, and it will continue to lose money in the coming months. The podcast strategy — buy the biggest ones, produce original content and rake in those sweet ad dollars — hasn’t worked fast enough. It might not have worked at all. Investors have been losing patience, with the stock value more than halving in November (though it has recovered slightly).
With the rise of video clips — especially video snippets of podcasts — Spotify is sensing a final hurrah to turn its podcast fortunes around. Rather than be a creator of hit original podcasts, it’s thinking it could be the home of all the podcasts — think YouTube — and by pumping your feed full of video snippets, it hopes it will get you listening to more and, in turn, driving up that ad revenue. With the increased ad revenue, the company hopes to start some kind of revenue share with creators (where have we heard that one before?), which will bring more creators onto the platform.
A solid strategy that works almost nowhere.
But the most important line came from Spotify’s product chief, Gustav Söderström. He said the changes were designed to make artist & creator discovery easier and, by default, reduce the time users spend searching for content. He was adamant the company was not optimizing for time spent on the new feed platform, stating that “our goal is not to steal time; it’s to help you save time.”
But, as The Verge’s Alex Heath pointed out, that “seems antithetical to an endless feed.”
This is the biggest problem with the continued ‘TikTokification’ of everything and anything. When copycat features are added without necessity, they make things worse. With Spotify, retail space on the screen is limited. It was already a bloodbath of musicians, podcasters and audiobooks vying for your attention — and that was just the ones you had already subscribed to. Throw in playlists and recommendations, and, well, Spotify was messy. While a vertical scroll feed is visually nicer — or at the very least, cleaner — it means there’s even less retail space for each piece of media to be seen. It’s also going to drive everyone who depends on the platform for income to start to go harder on these visuals; much like creators make outlandish thumbnails on YouTube, we can expect to see this visual clickbait make its way onto Spotify.
Vertical scrolling and near-full-screen visuals won’t make finding something easier. If anything, it will result in more time scrolling and more frustration, before just going to that same playlist you always listen to.
Spotify needs to decide what kind of media company it is. If it is moving towards flashy video content and pushing creators, that’s a huge step away from a music service and a huge step towards just another TikTok copycat.