Tuesday, April 2, 2024
Spotify, a music, podcast, and audiobook streaming platform, is now venturing into e-learning. The platform will be providing its users with video-based courses by partnering up with educational tech companies such as BBC Maestro, PLAYvirtuoso, Skillshare, and Thinkific.
This move seems to be the next logical step for Spotify, as approximately half of their 600 million users already stream podcasts and audiobooks on the platform for educational purposes. Babar Zafar, VP Product Development at Spotify said “Many of our users engage with podcasts and audiobooks on a daily basis for their learning needs, and we believe this highly engaged community will be interested in accessing and purchasing quality content from video course creators. At Spotify, we’re constantly striving to create new offerings for our creators and users and having built best-in-class personalized music and podcast offerings, we look forward to exploring the potential of video-based learning on Spotify”.
Spotify’s pitch to potential course providers is not just limited to the potential reach of a much wider audience. Spotify’s advantage also includes an ability to target potential customers for courses based on their existing listening habits on the app.
U.K. users will be the first to test out this feature. For both premium and basic users, the first two lessons will be free, and then a fee will apply to access the full course. Full courses will cost anywhere between £20 to £80 on average. The four category of courses are: “make music”, “get creative”, “learn business”, and “healthy living”. This feature will be available through the app and desktop. There is no word yet as to when or if this feature will roll out in North America.
Author: Jeffreen Rahman, 2023/2024 Articling Student