A look at 5 initiatives Spotify has abandoned: original video content, its hateful conduct policy, Spotify apps, direct music distribution, and Spotify Running
Tim Ingham / Rolling Stone :
Context & Ripple Effects
Tim Ingham's Rolling Stone retrospective lands at a moment when Spotify's abandoned-initiatives list has become a pattern worth naming. The company canceled its original video series back in 2017 while rethinking the strategy, and its 2018 hateful content and conduct policy — built with the AudioWatch scanning tool — has since quietly lapsed.
What makes the retrospective timely is that the retreats aren't all permanent: by 2024 Spotify was offering video creators seven figures to distribute shows on the platform, returning to video through third-party creators rather than in-house originals. Meanwhile other promised bets, like the higher-quality audio subscription announced three years earlier, remain undelivered — while Backstage, its open-source developer platform, has become the initiative it actually seeks to monetize.
First-order effects
- Spotify's strategic record now reads as serial retreat from consumer-facing side bets — original video, Spotify Apps, direct distribution, Spotify Running, the conduct policy — narrowing the company's public identity around core audio streaming.
- Artists and labels lose the formal framework of the hateful conduct policy, which had been Spotify's stated mechanism for distancing itself from controversial acts.
Second-order effects
- The 2024 creator-payment push shows the abandoned video effort resurfacing in inverted form: instead of producing originals, Spotify now rents distribution reach from creators who already built audiences on YouTube.
- Each lapsed initiative — including the still-unshipped hi-fi tier — raises the credibility cost of Spotify's next product announcement, giving competitors an opening to position their own feature roadmaps as more reliable.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Spotify's durable assets skew toward infrastructure rather than consumer experiments — Backstage, adopted by Netflix, LinkedIn, Epic, Roku, and 200+ others, points toward a company that monetizes developer tooling while consumer-facing bets stay cyclical.
- The video reversal suggests streaming platforms converge on creator-distributed content rather than commissioning originals, a structure closer to aggregation than studio economics.
The trend: Spotify's history is a cycle of launching consumer side bets, abandoning them, and returning to a few through third-party creators — with open-source infrastructure emerging as the initiative that sticks.