Spotify wants to show its favouritism towards rapper Kendrick Lamar. Or, more specifically, it wants fans to show off their favourite albums by him.
“This interactive in-app experience invites fans to select their five favorite Kendrick Lamar projects and then share them on social media with a customized visual,” explains Spotify.
The initiative is only available in (a very specific) 23 markets and it is only accessible via the Spotify app for iOS or Android. Clicking on the dedicated link will open it up in a new window on a user’s phone.
There is a carousel of album sleeves to pick from (dating back to his Section.80 debut album from 2011) and you pick your top five (meaning you only leave two albums out), then you can shift the priority order of the five. Doing so allows you to share your choices to social media where a customised visual is added to your picks.
The site is not only promoting Lamar’s catalogue, it is also pushing the seven-part Last Song Standing podcast series that looks at all his past releases (which was, unsurprisingly, created by Spotify). Lamar is an interesting first example here as he is big on Spotify but not massive. At the time of writing, he was listed at #47 in the world on Spotify in terms of its most-streamed acts. It all feels like the testing of the ground for more artists to have a similar Top 5 treatment.
The fact that it focuses on albums makes it relatively easy for users to shortlist their top five (especially if there are only seven albums/projects to pick from). Doing it for individual tracks would be a way for fans to show off their deep knowledge as well as pointing people towards hidden gems away from the obvious big tracks.
Maybe, however, this is Spotify wanting to show a commitment to the album as a body of work, getting people to recommend complete albums rather than their own micro-playlists of scattered tracks.
As it stands, however, there is no space for the esoteric in a fan’s choices which feels like over-simplifying the nature of fandom and a fan’s intricate knowledge of the long tail of an artist’s career.
