Spotify, which last week announced 60 million users (15 million paying) worldwide, is announcing an upgrade to its Windows Phone app that it hopes will get more owners of Microsoft-powered mobile phones to use its streaming music service. The new app features a slicker-looking black-colored theme, alongside (finally) the appearance of Spotify’s “Your Music” feature to let users save albums and tracks to their collections, as well as its updated Browse feature.
“Our new design makes accessing your favourite music smoother than ever before. The new dark theme and refined interface lets the content come forward and ‘pop’, just like in a cinema when you dim the lights,” the company notes in a blog post.
Meanwhile, the Browse feature — which was first launched way back in 2013 — sees Spotify “delivering even more relevant and localised content,” which taps into the trend among music services to be ever more sophisticated, personalizing music to specific moments and places where you are.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone mobile platform often plays second fiddle to Android and iOS when it comes to developers creating and updating apps — with the common refrain being that there are not enough users of those devices to merit the investment needed to develop for it.
It’s unclear, in that regard, what motivated Spotify to upgrade this app now. (We asked if there was a financial incentive to do so; the answer was no.) Spotify launched its first Windows app back in 2010 but it took until 2013 to update that to Windows Phone 8.
Suffice it to say that for Spotify subscribers who already use the iOS or Android apps, this latest upgrade to the WP app is about getting more parity with those other two, more popular platforms.
That said, Spotify’s competitors Rdio and Deezer have given love to Windows Phone and that may be one reason why the music streaming company will continue to pursue users on that platform, as part of its bigger strategy to be available to anyone who wants to use it.
There likely is a bigger reason for why Spotify would be interested in at last updating its Windows Phone app.
Some 52% of all listening on Spotify now happens on mobile and tablet devices — meaning that Spotify is effectively a mobile-first company.
That helps the company generate more revenues, since you need to pay for subscriptions to access all music features on these devices. And given Spotify is among those reportedly interested in filing for an IPO soon, it’s no surprise to see it updating apps across all mobile platforms to drive this trend further.
 
