Spotify, I owe you an apology — my smart TV finally got Spotify after years of waiting, and now I suddenly love its roster of music videos | Daily Reports Online
Spotify, I’m I owe you a huge apology.
For the past decade you’ve been my loyal music companion, but despite my tumultuous relationships with some of your features, your unmatched ubiquity means I can freely use you across my devices — with the exception, until recently, of my TV.
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Until now that is. Spotify launched on VIDAA TVs at the beginning of June, but I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t been casually flicking through my TV’s app carousel. After waiting for the best part of two years for it to arrive, you can imagine how excited I was.
Since the best music streaming service landed on my TV not a day has gone by where I haven’t used it, and it’s filled a huge void. And something miraculous happened in the process: I now enjoy viewing music videos on Spotify.
I’ve experienced a revelation
Prior to buying a smart TV, the Amazon Fire TV Stick was my streaming device of choice, and it has always supported the Spotify app. While I enjoy my playlists on mobile, streaming Spotify on the big screen offers an entirely different experience.
It’s not news that Spotify’s music video interface and I haven’t got along — its mobile experience is too clunky and disorganized for me — and I’ve always used YouTube to stream music videos as well as my favorite web shows. Even if it meant enduring a painful amount of ads, I’ve always stuck by YouTube’s side.
I’d gotten used to YouTube’s way of doing things in the absence of Spotify’s TV app, but as soon as that app arrived I fancied trying something different. The result? Goodbye YouTube.
Before now, I’ve never understood why I could never get along with the Spotify music video interface, but I could with YouTube; then it clicked. It wasn’t Spotify’s cluttered organization that was putting me off, it was far simpler than that: music video viewing isn’t necessarily designed for the mobile experience.
Though I only stream audio when listening through headphones, every song I play through my TV on Spotify is now more or less in video form, and I’ve been busy making the playlists to go with it.
Long live the music video
Music video viewing is a big part of my life, whether that’s for background listening, nostalgia indulgence, or for blasting on the big screen when I have friends around, and YouTube has always been my go-to.
What separates Spotify from the likes of YouTube is that, with the former, the focus isn’t on the music video itself. There’s the option to switch between audio and video of course, but YouTube put the music video on the map during the transitional period into digital streaming. This is what tempted me to sign up to a YouTube Premium free trial.
I began by making playlists to mimic the nostalgia of music channels, but creating playlists on YouTube is a little fiddly, and there are all kinds of issues with the queuing system. And though you can make playlists without a Premium account, the ad interruptions ruin the viewing experience. So when Spotify launched on my smart TV, I put the pedal to the metal.
Before I knew it I had made five monster MTV-themed playlists spanning from the 1980s all the way to the 2020s, each packed to the brim with songs and their accompanying videos. That was my one rule: if it doesn’t have a music video, it doesn’t go in the playlist. I haven’t used YouTube to watch music videos since, and the ad-free experience still feels too good to be true, but the joy I get from it goes beyond simply watching the visual accompaniments to my favorite songs past and present.
I consider myself a pop culture historian, and evoking the nostalgia of music channels is one of the defining elements of my music video obsession. For me, there’s no other feeling quite like bingeing music videos from MTV’s VMA peak era — think Bad Romance, Hot N Cold, Maneater. If you were there at the time, you get it.
But the music video is so much more than that. There’s a huge educational aspect for me, allowing me to step into the past to learn more about pioneering artists who paved the way for bigger and more successful acts. Using Spotify to house my video-centric playlists has been perfect for enriching my knowledge, and it also means I get to visit my parents’ youth, all while streaming old favorites I never knew had music videos.
On reflection, I guess there was never really a reason for me to dismiss Spotify’s music video integration — I just didn’t know how to use it to its full potential. I’m still not a fan of the viewing experience for mobile, but now that I know how to optimize my music video viewing, there’s no going back.
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