• by Colin Kirkland , October 5, 2023

To help artists better connect with their fans and earn more revenue on its music streaming service, Spotify is rolling out redesigned artist profiles.

The new profiles organize music, concerts, merch and social media-like clips under Music, Events, and Merch tabs aimed at promoting new content, but also ticket sales and crowdsourcing links to financial apps and music relief organizations. 

“Millions of fans around the world visit artists’ profiles every single day and 90% of those fans interact with the page in some way,” Spotify wrote in a blog post. “This real estate is key when it comes to creating fan connections."

The Music tab, for starters, has been redesigned to showcase popular releases and feature playlists in addition to an Artist Pick, a spotlight selection of what’s most important to an artist, such as their own release, playlist, show announcement, merch or podcast. Artists can leave an attached comment for context. Spotify says the Artist Pick will expire after six months to keep it fresh for fans. 

Under the Music tab, artists can also include a fundraising destination for themselves, their team, or a specific cause they wish to support. The Popular feature ranks an artist's top tracks based on all-time and recent streams that updates every day, still allowing artists to manually alter the list.

Over the past year, Spotify has been leaning into short-form video in response to the TikTokification of the entire social media and streaming landscape. Therefore, it is planning to let artists upload Clips, under 30-second videos, to their profile, although the feature is still in beta.

In addition, artist bios can now include links to profiles on other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X or Wikipedia in a Linktree-like list, sparking fans to further explore an artist they are curious about.

For the repositioned Events tab, Spotify is continuing to invite fans to purchase tickets to a specific artist's upcoming shows, or tap an “Interested” button to allow updates about more shows in their area.

The company says that in testing a dedicated events tab, it saw a 70% surge in user engagement with concerts on the platform, which it says led to a 15% increase in users purchasing concert tickets.

When fans purchase tickets via the Events tab, they will be redirected to Spotify's third-party ticket sales partners, including Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, AXS, Songkick, Dice and more.

Finally, on the Merch tab, artists can now show up to 12 of their merch items, with the most recently listed items appearing first). The company says a dedicated merch tab test led to more fan interactions and merch purchases, with a 22% increase in users purchasing a merch item when visiting the merch tab on a profile.

In-app merch sales are made possible via a partnership Spotify made with Shopify in 2021, which invited artists to sync their product catalogs to Spotify.

Spotify's last major redesign was announced at the company’s Stream On event in March, during which the company said it would prioritize vertical videos that users can easily scroll through in the style of TikTok's home feed. The company also launched a Smart Shuffle recommendation feature.

Spotify is clearly trying to bulk up its podcast and audiobook offerings as well, with new tools and outside partnerships. On Wednesday, the streaming platform promised Premium subscribers access to over 150,000 audiobooks for online and offline listening.

The company's new profile tabs design is rolling out to its mobile app, but not on desktop or web.