Spotify and Snapchat each announced new social-sharing capabilities on the same day, further connecting music streaming with social platforms.
Spotify Sharing Expands
Spotify’s new features allow users to share whatever is currently playing directly to Threads, WhatsApp Status, and LinkedIn. A separate integration with Snapchat enables saving songs discovered on that app to a Spotify library, as well as sharing music from Spotify to the Snap Map.
Snap Map’s Now Playing Feature
Snapchat is turning its Snap Map into a music-discovery surface. The new Now Playing feature displays what people are listening to in real time, provided they have connected a music service. Snap stated that the feature is “starting with Spotify,” signalling plans to add other services over time. Snap Map launched in 2017 as a location-sharing tool and now counts over 450 million monthly users.
Industry Considerations
The feature taps into a trend of performative music streaming, where sharing a song becomes an expression of identity, combining location, music, and a custom digital avatar. Labels may face a new challenge in getting tracks to trend on Snap Map in tastemaker hotspots such as Williamsburg, Surulere, Shoreditch or Bandra. A&R teams could gain another platform to monitor for emerging artists.
Social and streaming integrations should provide useful data, though collecting accurate metrics on music shared in WhatsApp statuses, LinkedIn posts, Threads conversations, and Snap Map remains difficult. As music sharing on social platforms grows, the benefits for those platforms, including data, user stickiness, and ad views, will be closely watched by the music industry during future commercial negotiations with Spotify or another digital service provider (DSP).
