Introduction

Spotify is a digital music, podcast, and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from many creators all over the world. Spotify is a free platform until you have a subscription plan to access some features or get more features. Spotify is available across a range of devices including phones, computers, tablets, speakers, TVs, and cars across different platforms such as androids and apple operating systems. You can easily transition from one device to another with Spotify Connect.

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Spotify offers content creators a platform to create content for its billions of users, such as music and podcasts or podcasts audiobooks. The content can then be recommended to many users across the system according to user preferences, such as a music genre or type of podcasts certain users prefers to listen to. Spotify gives users basic functionality in the platform and to get more features a user has to upgrade to a premium account which offers more features such as downloading music for offline listening, ad-free music listening, playing songs in any order, and unlimited skips.

With billions of accounts and millions of songs that are available on the platform, Spotify offers easier access to content that is a specific preference of a user account. Spotify algorithm learns what the user accounts prefer to listen to, giving users a better experience in the platform and faster access to content that they prefer in a form of a mixed playlist. In terms of music, Spotify learns from what a user listens to on daily basis, and then it generates playlists and recommends more songs and playlists based on what it learns. This creates a great experience in the platform in a way that users are able to discover more similar songs that they like or more artists that makes music that they prefer to listen to. Spotify also recommends new music experiences that a user might be interested in, such as different playlists with songs of the same genre or a different genre.

Spotify generates statistics for both the artists’ and the listeners’ accounts to give detailed information about the account activities. Listeners get basic statistics of their Spotify account activities such as the top tracks of the month, top artists for the month, and all artists the account is following. Spotify also generates annual statistics of the top 100 songs the user has been listening to the whole year called Spotify wrapped. Artists get statistics of the content that they posted, the statistics are more detailed than what the listeners get. Artists get statistics like listeners, streams, followers, top songs, top playlists, audience statics such as gender and age group of content listeners, and more.

Spotify has a great marketing plan and an excellent way to generate income on the platform while still attracting many users to the platform. The platform has billions of accounts and that makes it a good place for advertisers to advertise their products and target many users from all around the world. Organisations or individuals can set up a campaign using the Spotify ads website and manage the ads to reach their target audience and then pay a certain fee for the ads based on how they manage it. The ads can be shown to all targeted Spotify users. Spotify has a premium plan that it offers to its users who want more features and also don’t want to be interrupted by ads while playing music or listening to podcasts, since Spotify adverts play between songs which can be an issue when they have to wait 30 seconds for the next song while the ad is playing. Users who are on premium plans are not targeted by ads and Spotify gets income from the account subscriptions.

Spotify has put in place rules and policies to monitor and control the content on the platform. Spotify is a global platform hence the need to control and moderate the platform content since there are users all over the world from different cultures, beliefs, and laws. Thus, what one culture may consider not harmful another may consider the content to be harmful. In addition, Spotify allows accounts from the age of thirteen and up. However, a guardian must provide consent when a user is a minor. Thus, if the content is not controlled it may be potentially harmful to minors who are using the platform. Consequently, Spotify has set in place strict rules to guard against content that is deemed as dangerous, deceptive, sensitive, and illegal content.

Spotify has four rules for moderate content. First, the dangerous content rule is a way to prevent content creators from creating content that promotes violence, incites hatred, harasses, or engages in any other behaviour that may place people in harm’s way. Secondly, the deceptive content rule prevents content creators from deceiving or scamming users by claiming that they are not who they are, or malicious practices to deceive others. Thirdly, the sensitive content rule is a way to prevent content creators from violent or graphic content and sexually explicit content that may be harmful or inappropriate to other people. Lastly, the illegal content rule is to prevent content creators from posting content that is unlawful and to encourage them to follow the rules on the platform.

Conclusion

Spotify is an excellent platform for artists and podcasters who want their content to reach as many people around the world as well as derive an income from their content. Their income is dependant on how algorithm works and the detailed statistics that artists receive on how their content is doing – be it good or bad. In addition, if there is a campaign running, an artist can tell if it is doing well or not from reading the statistics. This helps artists to formulate plans for how to make their content better in order for it to be more feasible.

The platform controlling the content that artists posts make Spotify a great environment for every single user around the world from a different age group, language, culture, or sexual orientation to be able to use the platform without being offended by any of the posted content, or the graphic content harming minors or hatred towards a different group of people. These rules keep users on the platform since the content is safe which then increases Spotify’s marketing target audience which makes the platform a gold to advertisers that they can create successful campaigns for their products and target such a large audience around the world Spotify is able to generate income from that. The platform is a successful community where everyone successfully gets what they are there for, artists putting out content to generate income, listers getting good content with less effort, advertisers getting the most from their campaigns, and Spotify generating income from both ads and subscriptions.