Spotify Clips Brings Instagram Stories Format to Spotify for Artists

Spotify is jumping on the “Stories” bandwagon with Spotify Clips. At its online-only Stream On event on Monday, Spotify announced Spotify Clips — à la Snapchat and Instagram Stories — that will be available on Spotify artist pages, and will allow them to connect with fans in a new way. The ever-expanding rollout of “Stories” (an ephemeral way to share photos and videos, usually for 24 hours) across platforms has become a bit of running joke — it's even available on LinkedIn (why?) — and it's only natural / inevitable that Spotify would want to get into “Stories” as well. Spotify Clips is currently in testing.

Of course, unlike other platforms, Spotify Clips will behave very differently — it won't be available to everyone for one. Listeners, people like you and me, won't get to share their own “Stories”. Instead, only select creators with a Spotify for Artists page will be able to upload photos and videos to Spotify Clips. Alongside the Stream On event, Spotify announced that over 10,000 Indian artists have claimed their Spotify for Artists profiles since the world's biggest music subscription service launched in the South Asian market two years ago.

This is what Spotify Clips will look like
Photo Credit: Spotify

“Stories” have been essentially to growing platforms' daily active users, with Instagram revealing in 2019 that 500 million users check out Instagram Stories every day. This raises an interesting point: why would fans not just keep up with their favourite artists on Instagram, where they already are, instead of opening another app? Maybe if there's exclusive content. Spotify will hope that artists do that — driving people to come to Spotify Clips, and stay afterwards to play some songs.

Spotify now has more than 345 million monthly active users and over 155 million paid subscribers around the world, the Sweden-headquartered music giant announced earlier in February.