The recent regulatory provisions have made another victim of freedom of expression in Russia with Spotify, however, engaged in testing a further way to discover new music, which has decided to suspend its operations in the Russian Federation.
The very popular streaming platform not only audio born in Sweden with the name of Spotify, now a reference point in the sector, has recently taken a new position on the conflict in Ukraine and, at the same time, has started to test a new discovery function in favor of its users.
The war in Ukraine has been going on for 44 days to date, during which various mass media realities (eg Netflix) have decided to interrupt their broadcasting and production operations in Russia as a form of condemnation for the so-called ” special military operation ”promoted by the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin.
Spotify, at first, had decided to continue operating in Russia, motivating its decision with the need to provide, in the region, where freedom of information is a rare commodity, reliable and independent news and, also, with the purpose of “Allow the global flow of information”: on the other hand, the Swedish platform had chosen to remove all content supported by Kremlin-backed media, such as Russia Today or Sputnik, and to limit the availability of Russian content.
However, things have changed, and Spotify has also decided to interrupt, or rather suspend, its operations in Russia, from next April 11, as communicated in an email to its local users, to whom it has been reported that they will be able to reactivate the service. when they are abroad. In this case, the reason given by the big S of CEO Daniel EK is that a recent legislation passed in Russia, which criminalizes non-aligned news and access to information in general, endangers both the safety of listeners and that of the locals. Spotify employees.
After starting testing (at the end of March) an audio news feed in favor of podcasts, Spotify has just started testing a new discovery feature in Ireland, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand that should help users. to familiarize yourself with new music, expanding your horizons.
All this will happen through a vertical video feed in TikTok style, spotted for the first time in November, where the Canvas will scroll in loop (a function introduced in 2019 with GIF artwork that is continuously reproduced while listening to a given song) of the 15 songs that the platform will recommend every day. By intervening on the relative Canvas, if in this feed you notice a song of your taste, it will be possible to share it on social networks, add it to your playlists or decide to follow the artist.