If you're a Spotify user, you may have noticed a new setting within the app in recent days. The company has confirmed it is trialling 'Sponsored Songs' within playlists.
Spotify has trialled sponsored content in the past, allowing brands to sponsor popular playlists, but this new model will allow record labels to promote individual songs. The company has confirmed that Sponsored Songs is a test programme that will only appear to users of the free service.
Is this new? An auto-enabled setting in @spotify to "show sponsored songs" under Display Options? pic.twitter.com/wiwzcQFVe5
— Chris Messina 🦅 (@chrismessina) June 18, 2017
Sponsored songs appear within a playlist and are chosen to match a user's music taste. It is possible to save a song or add it to a different playlist without clicking onto an ad.
The feature is currently only being tested on certain accounts but it is possible to switch it off if you are one of them. Simply go to Settings > Sponsored Content and swipe the toggle off.
Spotify recently welcomed the music of Taylor Swift back onto the platform. Swift had previously pulled her music from the streaming service, complaining that the service didn’t compensate artists fairly.
"All I can say is that music is changing so quickly, and the landscape of the music industry itself is changing so quickly, that everything new, like Spotify, all feels to me a bit like a grand experiment," she said in 2014.
