Looks like Spotify falls short of It’s competitors
Spotify has been a ton of upgrades and updates to make the app much more personal and in programming its playlists. But while the software was busy in that, the service has overlooked a few key features that companies like Apple, Google and Amazon have developed.
It might not seem like much of a big deal, but the feature of showing lyrics, and especially to sync lyrics with the music is something that is very much requested. Apple Music has shown enough interest in that aspect, and with the iOS 12 rollout, users would, as usual, be able to see the lyrics with the song, and now would also be able to search for lyrics instead of searching for an artist, album or a song title.
Amazon Music does not need much work in this area since it already has this feature. The service has quietly grown to be the third largest music streaming service in the market right now, and with its tie-up with Alexa, the service can now even detect and start searches by just saying, “play the song that goes..”, and like that the service would start playing the song.
Limited Features
This is no new feature as the service has been offering this capability for the past two years. Only power users know about this feature, and right now many consider this as a standard feature that comes with Alexa.
Google’s service is considered to be backward at present, but Google has a few tricks up its sleeve, like being capable of search-by-lyrics and also the feature to search for songs that work like Shazam.
Right now, Spotify supports lyrics search only in Japan, and in the app’s code references are found that show that this feature would be available only in a few other countries like Vietnam and Thailand. The company has not issued any date when this feature would be available in the United States or any other country, as the service has denied answers such questions.
Spotify has previously partnered with third-party apps or services, but they all eventually fell out. But this has not stopped users from taking to social networks to request the company from incorporati
ng lyrics with the songs. Spotify, in the meantime, has been working with a few other features that would rival local, homegrown apps that come with a bunch of features like voice search.
Lack of Features
This feature was primarily rolled on to premium users first, and that was accessible via a long press on the search icon within the app. Many are not even aware of such a feature as it is tucked away, hidden beneath a search icon. But though this feature is useful, there is still something missing, and that is hands-free use.
For example, Apple Music users can use Siri hands-free to trigger a search on Apple Music, and Pandora is now supported by Google Assistant. But though this music service is facing this much trouble right now, the service is also would be facing trouble in the future too. Hardware.
Spotify does not have any hardware of its own, and so exclusivity is something that is out of the question. Apple has the Home Pod, Google has the Google Home, Amazon has the Echo, but Spotify still lacks a hardware it can call its own.
For now, Spotify is playing all through partners, and the partners are not expected to play nice for a while. Despite all these, Spotify does not need to panic, as it is doing pretty well in other aspects. Right now Spotify needs to identify its weak points, and just fix it. Now that is not necessarily difficult.
