We’ve written a lot about ‘original content’ on music-streaming services in the past year or two: from video shows on Spotify to documentaries commissioned for Apple Music to podcasts on Spotify and Deezer to… There’s a lot of activity anyway.
But the elephant in the room is the question of whether many people are actually watching or listening to all this stuff, with no public figures available.
Bloomberg suggests that in Spotify’s case, its initial round of originals “failed to catch on with audiences”, as context for its story about Spotify’s head of content partnerships Tom Calderone leaving the company.
The former VH1 boss joined Spotify in March 2016, and commissioned a series of shows for the company’s nascent video offering. Bloomberg suggests that with his departure, Spotify is “narrowing its video ambitions… the company is making clearer that it wants videos on the service to stay closer to the music industry”.
The addition of video to top-tier playlists like RapCaviar is part of that. This at least will put this kind of original content in front of lots of Spotify users: the existing original shows have been somewhat low-profile in their promotion on the service in the past.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…