Spotify’s eight thousand vaccine-themed playlists, and renaming Locker Room

On Spotify’s in-house podcast, Spotify: For the Record, CEO Daniel Ek and CFO Paul Vogel relax out of earnings-report mode and talk about the business more informally. A recent episode revealed that Spotify users have created over 8,000 vaccine-related playlists during Covid. This page details the phenomenon. (“Hit Me With Your Best Shot” by Pat Benatar and “The Cure” by Lady Gaga are frequently and amusingly included in these lists.)

A note of more substance: Spotify will rename its recent acquisition of Locker Room, a live audio conversation space for sports fans, to Spotify Greenroom. As the rebrand implies, the service will have an expanded focus to include music creators and culture topics, in addition to sports. That obviously makes sense, and enlarges Spotify’s upcoming play in realtime social audio. Daniel Ek’s broad statement on that: “The opportunity in live, just from a consumer standpoint, is how can we create really engaging formats to allow these creators to express themselves and connect with their audience. And we’ve been watching this space from afar just feeling very, very excited about the potential opportunity.”

Paul Voegl held forth on Spotify’s continuing quest to be the world’s biggest audio platform. In Vogel’s thinking, a lot of it is about attracting creators. “The more creators we have on the platform, the more unique, original, differentiated content we have differentiated product. It’s going to bring more users. It’s going to bring more engagement for those users. Those users will stick around longer. The retention will go up, the churn will go down.”

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Brad Hill