Back in April, Spotify blogged about musicians setting up virtual concerts as Covid-19 forced them offstage. (How Artists Are Coming Together for Virtual Festivals)
If the company wasn’t putting two + two together at that time, it might be now. That is an easy conclusion to draw from hacker and reverse engineer Jane Manchung Wong, who uncovered non-public screens within the Spotify app indicating live virtual concert streaming in development.
Spotify has been involved in concerts for years, offering personalized promotions by taste and geography to its app users. The company already has relationships with ticketing companies ticketmaster, Songkick, and others.
Jane Manchung Wong is fairly celebrated for her non-damaging hacker exploits. Employees at Facebook have said that Wong’s releases are a better source of product development within Facebook than internal communications.
It certainly makes sense to us, if Spotify is developing live virtual concerts. The company is already fluent with video and connected with ticketing. Putting thousands of users together into a unified audience would be a new challenge, we speculate, but a compelling added feature. extending the thought further, we love the idea of putting publishing control into the hands of musicians, so they could produce and promote their own concerts on the Spotify platform.