Audio streaming platform Spotify has announced a new listening experience for its platform, allowing creators to add complete music tracks to their podcast shows.
“We’re beginning to test a new listening experience that brings together music and spoken-word content in an easy and elegant package, allowing full songs and talk commentary to live together wrapped up in one show,” Spotify said in an official post.
For this new format, listeners will be able to interact with music tracks within Spotify’s podcast episodes similar to how they interact with all other song tracks on Spotify. They will be able to like and share these songs along with reading more information about a track without leaving the episode page or searching for it manually.
They can pull up the track list for a particular episode through ‘Explore Episode’ on the episode page or tap the play bar at the bottom of the screen. From there, they can go to different segments and songs and save songs for future listening.
“Shows using this format are exclusive to Spotify because they rely on Spotify’s music catalogue licenses and compensate musicians and songwriters just like any regular stream of a music track on Spotify,” clarified the platform.
Spotify Premium listeners will be able to listen to the entire track directly within the episode while free users will hear 30-second music previews.