An official spokesperson for Spotify confirmed to TechCrunch on Monday that the business is discontinuing its live-audio service, Spotify Live. The business claims that it would keep investigating live services on its primary platform. Music Ally was the first to break the news.

“After a period of experimentation and learnings around how Spotify users interact with live audio, we’ve made the decision to sunset the Spotify Live app,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch in an email. “We believe there is a future for live fan-creator interactions in the Spotify ecosystem; however, based on our learnings, it no longer makes sense as a standalone app. We have seen promising results in the artist-focused use case of ‘listening parties,’ which we will continue to explore moving forward to facilitate live interactions between artists and fans.”

 At the time, Spotify noted that while live listening in the main Spotify app would not support the interactive features, it would instead give creators the opportunity to reach a larger audience of Spotify’s 406 million global listeners. Spotify Live would continue to function as Greenroom did by allowing creators to interact with their audience in real-time and serve as a creative mechanism for hosts.

With its $62 million acquisition of the start-up Betty Labs in March 2021, Spotify acquired the application that would become Greenroom. The app, which was once called as Locker Room, had a particular interest in how live audio and sports material interacted. In June 2021, Spotify promptly changed the app’s name to Greenroom and released it. The business subsequently started airing live weekly shows in an effort to increase consumer use of its live audio service. Greenroom, however, was unable to take off in a market that had already abandoned the live audio trend.

Spotify appeared to be lowering its expectations for live audio in December when it stopped producing a number of its live audio programmes, including “Deux Me After Dark,” “Doughboys: Snack Pack,” “The Cinema Buff,” and “A Gay in the Life.”

Given that Spotify has been making significant investments in podcasts and related technology over the past few years, its entry into the live audio industry first seemed like a natural match for the business. Spotify has been successful with podcasts, but it seems to have had trouble with live audio.

It’s important to note that Spotify is not the only business to abandon live audio. Facebook incorporated its Live Audio Rooms service, a Clubhouse ripoff, into its Facebook Live experience last year. The social media behemoth also stopped supporting its Audio hub and short-form audio tool Soundbites.

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