Spotify Launches A New Backstory Feature

Spotify has teamed up with a company called Genius in an effort to try to take using the platform to the next level.

G enius provides annotated song lyrics, backstory and commentary that pops up as you stream a track via special "Behind The Lyrics" playlists.

The commentary comes from the artists and is not crowd-sourced or user generated. This allows artists to stay more connected with their audience without having the work required of a social platform.

The feature is just being rolled out, with the "Behind The Lyrics (Hip Hop)" as the first playlist.

What's especially interesting is that the feature will be available to both free and premium users, which seems to show that Spotify is a bit insecure with its current top position in the streaming world.

With Apple Music's recent leak about its 10 million paid users and Pandora's pending purchase of Rdio's infrastructure out of bankruptcy, this seems to be a pre-emptive strike to either keep its current users from thinking about another platform, or lure some new users away from the others. Either way, Spotify wants to keep as many eyeballs, free or paid, glued to the service as possible, and the connection with Genius is another step in doing so.

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Using Spotify Playlists To Boost Your Fan Base

An easy thing that artists and bands can do to increase fan engagement and even increase your fan base is to create and share Spotify playlists.

This has been known to gain a lot of attention with both fans and non-fans alike. It's also something that big brands do all the time.

One example is Red Bull, who sponsor a discovery playlist, and another is Coca-Cola, who create branded playlists built around a "happiness" theme.

One of the reasons this works is because Spotify patrons don't like ads, but they do like brands, and the playlists help them identify with it. Of course the caveat is that you have to treat the creation of the playlist with some thought and an interesting approach to be taken seriously.

A good example is a friend who created a a playlist based around the soundtracks of Will Smith movies. He was astonished to find more than 50,000 shares within the first 24 hours.

Using Spotify playlists is just another way to increase audience engagement and increase your fan base. If you listen to Spotify a lot, put your listening to good use and create and share a playlist.

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