Spotify’s ‘Blend’ started as a feature to automatically create shared playlists with certain friends, before expanding to include famous artists as the blendees. That continued yesterday with the addition of three more: Lizzo, The Chainsmokers and Post Malone.
However, what’s more interesting is the new feature that comes with them: the ability to buy merch from these and the other artists (BTS, Charli XCX, Kacey Musgraves etc) who are part of Blend.
The process is a little fiddly: it involves figuring out how to access your ‘social sharecard’ from a Blend playlist created with one of these stars, and then tapping/clicking through to their merch on Shopify.
It’s thus necessarily limited by which artists Spotify chooses to add to Blend, but if the feature opens up more widely in the future, it could be useful.