Spotify’s new feature, Premium Mini is a gamified incentive payment plan currently being tested in India. Throughout Asia Streaming services are experimenting with different strategies to achieve a competitive edge within the market. Catering to local music taste along with providing international catalogs has been one of the primary strategies for building user bases within the extremely competitive region. Spotify is currently trying out this new feature for its pay-as-you-go plans in India, to incentivize users.
For only seven rupees ($0.085), Spotify offers its Premium Mini service for one day, or 25 rupees ($0.30) for a week. This experiment provides users of the app with a usage-based discount and other benefits. Premium Mini users who use the service for 10 days within a 30-day period can receive a week of the service free of charge.
Spotify Senior Product Manager Szymon Kopeć says the new feature has been built with Asia in mind to incentivize app use.
Gacha mechanics derived from the popularity of toy vending machines or in games as loot boxes used to entice players to spend in-game currency. The effectiveness of this mechanic has led to a gamification of apps that is well received by Asian countries like India, Korea, Japan, and China. Gamification of platforms helps increase engagement because users are enticed to use the app every single day to earn their reward.
Gamification is a term for using game design elements in non-game contexts. In other words, making things more fun by adding competition or points. Music streaming services use this method to keep their listeners engaged.
Spotify uses playlists that change daily to catalog your top songs over the last year. These create incentives over various time periods that are designed to keep a user engaged.
Like many other platforms, Spotify offers both random and fixed rewards to their users. An example of a fixed reward would be the Discover Weekly playlist that is generated for each user based on their listening habits. Even though Spotify’s algorithm can predict which songs a user might like, there is still some element of chance involved in whether or not the listener will enjoy the next song. However, users can take their chances discovering new music- something they’re likely to want to do multiple times if they’ve enjoyed it in the past.
Random rewards, such as 30 minutes of ad-free listening, let users sample paid service. This new Premium Mini in-app feature is a fixed reward–use the app for 10 days and earn a week more of use for only a 10% price increase.
Spotify has also launched a new feature called Spotify challenges. Those who complete a challenge will be rewarded with a premium mini subscription plan for just 2 Rupees. You can get six one-day subscriptions by spending 42 Rupees (Rs 7×6). You can also buy a weekly premium mini subscription plan for 25 Rupees, and Spotify will lower the price of next week’s premium mini subscription to only 2 Rupees. If you have been a Spotify user for some time now, there’s also a good chance you can get 3 months of Spotify Premium free of charge.
As the fight for user base continues within Asia, streaming services will have to continue to experiment with creative ways to incentivize their listeners.
