Spotify’s doubling down on its Clubhouse-style live audio feature

Spotify is planning to bring its Greenroom live conversation feature into its main music streaming app, allowing content creators to initiate discussions that listeners can interact with. 

According to a report by Bloomberg, which cites “people familiar with the company’s plans”, Greenroom will be renamed as ‘Spotify Live’ and will now be housed within the main app, rather than requiring users to download a separate app. 

We’ve reached out to Spotify, but the company is yet to comment on the matter. In any case, iOS developer Steven Moser claims to have found evidence of the change in a beta version of Spotify’s iPhone app, sharing an image of the new logo to Twitter:

It’s an interesting move from the music streaming service. While Spotify has had a huge (and lucrative) focus on the world of spoken word and podcasts over the past few years, the Spotify Greenroom app never really took off in the way the company was hoping. 

It was initially launched in mid-2021, in a bid to cash in on the success of Clubhouse, a platform that allows you to converse with friends or strangers with shared hobbies around the world, and listen in on conversations between celebrities and topic experts.

Spotify wasn’t the only company to hop on the trend for live conversations; Twitter Spaces lets you chat to others about any topic in a virtual room while your followers listen in, and you can even record and save these conversations like a live podcast. 

Twitter Spaces has been a lot more successful than Spotify Greenroom – and a large part of that is probably down to the fact that you can easily access it in the main Twitter app. It makes sense that Spotify would want to make it easier for subscribers to find and use the feature – and if some of its biggest podcasters get on board, we can see it becoming quite popular. 

Still no sign of Spotify HiFi…

It’s no huge surprise that Spotify is continuing its push to become the world’s biggest podcast host, but it’ll need to market its new Live feature very effectively to get subscribers to take notice – a lot of people just want to pop on a pair of headphones, stick on a playlist, and enjoy their music. 

We image a lot of those people – subscribers that primarily use Spotify for music rather than podcasts – will be wondering what has happened to the platform’s long-promised high quality streaming tier?

According to Spotify, high-quality music streaming is consistently one of the most requested new features by its users who, previously, have been limited to 320kbps. That’s why it announced Spotify HiFi last year, a new feature that’ll allow users to hear lossless CD-quality audio, which should mean songs sound far more detailed. 

The announcement was met with a great deal of excitement – but one year on, there’s no sign of Spotify Hifi, with CEO Daniel Ek even admitting that he doesn’t know when it’ll arrive.

We’re not sure what the hold up is. It could be because Apple Music and Amazon Music HD both announced soon after that they would offer hi-res audio streams to their subscribers at no extra cost. If Spotify was hoping its HiFi tier would be a new moneymaker, that could have been a big blow. 

Spotify Live is expected to launch in the second quarter of this year (April, May, or June). So, we could see a dual announcement, with Spotify HiFi as the headline feature, accompanied by a refreshed version of Greenroom. We’re not super hopeful, though – we were expecting HiFi to launch at the beginning of this year, and the stream of leaks and rumors we saw last year is drying up.