Spotify Is Canceling Its Live Audio App
Spotify will be canceling its live app at the end of this month.
After two years of trying to get its live audio app to take off, Spotify is finally pulling the plug. The app, which was called Spotify Live, was a standalone app separate from the music platform that recently had Linda Ronstadt’s song “Long Long Time” streaming at the top of the charts after it was heard on The Last of Us. It was an app that was similar to Clubhouse, a conversational app that grew famous during the pandemic.
Per The Hollywood Reporter, after two years of attempting to make a live conversations app work, Spotify is axing the project. The live app was first launched in 2021, following the success of competitor, Clubhouse. It was intended to be an app where listeners could tune in to their favorite speakers as they lead discussions live.
Spotify didn’t start from scratch to build the spin-off app from its very popular music platform. Instead, executives purchased the live audio app Betty Labs for $67.7 million and rebranded the software with the company’s own lime green and black logo and branding and called it Spotify Greenroom. When that didn’t take off, the music company rebranded the app again, this time calling it Spotify Live, and enlisted celebrities like Alex Cooper, Hasan Minhaj, and Tana Mongeau to help spread awareness.
Through the first half of 2022, Spotify continued backing its live app, even creating a three-season contract with the popular sports podcast Fantasy Footballers. However, signs of trouble began to show by the end of 2022, when Spotify suddenly began to cancel a multitude of contracts it had with its creators. Deux Me After Dark, Doughboys: Snack Pack, The Movie Buff, A Gay in the Life, Taylor Talk, and Lorem Life were all canceled, with at least two of the programs being canceled midway through their contracts. However, Spotify reportedly did pay out the contract in full at the time of cancelation.
Despite Spotify canceling its Spotify Live app, this is not the end of the music streaming platform’s experimentation with live content. “We believe there is a future for live fan-creator interactions in the Spotify ecosystem; however, based on our learnings, it no longer makes sense as a standalone app,” a spokesperson for the music app said, promising that the company would continue to explore more ways to create live streaming content in the future.
Spotify Live will officially end on April 30. After that, select shows will remain on the original Spotify platform as non-live content.
