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Spotify is one of the world’s most popular music streaming services — and it seems it wants to be more than that.
The Swedish music platform announced it was adding comments on podcasts as a way for creators to interact with listeners. The new feature “expands on” Q&A and polls, which the platform introduced in 2021. According to Spotify, over 9 million unique listeners on the platform have used either Q&A or polls this year, and the features have experienced 80% year-over-year growth.
The platform could also expand on comments, too. Maya Prohovnik, Spotify’s vice president of podcast product, told Techcrunch she “can see a world where we extend [support for comments] to other formats on Spotify, but we always want to do whatever is right for the format, and those types of creators and artists.”
The comments feature for podcasts “provide[s] a creator-controlled way for podcasters to interact with their fans on Spotify,” a company spokesperson said in a statement shared with Quartz. “While we are always exploring more ways for creators and artists to reach and engage with their fans, we don’t have any specific plans to share at this time.”
During Spotify’s first quarter 2024 earnings call, chief executive Daniel Ek said the company is “focused on winning discovery and we’re going to add as many ways that we can to improve the discovery of Spotify.” He pointed to the platform adding music videos and music clips where artists can engage with fans.
Ek said TikTok and other social media platforms “have obviously improved the user experience,” and as an industry, all the companies are “learning about these trends and best practices and trying to improve our products.”
As Spotify seemingly tries to enter the social network game, competition is growing between other social media platforms vying for users. According to figures seen by the Financial Times, X said its number of global daily active users was 251 million in the second quarter of this year — just 1.6% above what it was a year ago. Before Elon Musk acquired the social media platform for $44 billion in October 2022, the platform previously known as Twitter had experienced double-digit year-over-year growth, including 33.8% growth in the second quarter of 2022.
Meanwhile, Meta’s rival platform, Threads, reached 175 million monthly active users in its first year, according to chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. In April, Threads counted 28 million daily active users, beating out X, which had 22 million.