Spotify, Meta, and Netflix find Gen Z elusive in a way TikTok never has; Spotify says its Blend playlist feature is mostly used by Gen Z
Good afternoon from Puerto Rico. Hope you all are staying safe out there. Hollywood is celebrating the good news of a record-breaking weekend for the new …
Context & Ripple Effects
Spotify has spent two years probing why its core product underperforms with younger listeners: Billboard reported in late 2020 that music streaming had plateaued at roughly 17.5B streams a week while games, TikTok, and podcasts kept growing, and last month Spotify confirmed it was testing Discover, a TikTok-style vertical video feed built on repurposed Canvas clips. The new data point cuts both ways — Spotify concedes Gen Z is elusive, yet names Blend, its collaborative playlist feature, as the rare thing they actually use.
The pattern extends beyond audio. The same coverage tracks how young musicians build huge followings on TikTok while making little money there, which explains both why labels' audiences live on TikTok and why Spotify keeps borrowing its formats rather than competing head-on.
First-order effects
- Spotify now has internal evidence that co-creation features like Blend — alongside the Group Session multi-user control it rolled out in 2020 — are its working channel to Gen Z, giving its product team a validated template to prioritize over passive catalog browsing.
Second-order effects
- Meta and Netflix, named in the same finding, face pressure to answer with their own participation mechanics — Netflix's move into avatar-based personas across games via Ready Player Me fits exactly this gap, while Meta can route agent-driven experiences through Meta AI.
Third-order effects
- If Blend-style co-creation keeps outperforming passive streaming for young users, music platforms will keep converging on TikTok's participatory grammar — feeds, shared sessions, identity portability — shifting the industry from selling catalogs to hosting social listening.
The trend: Legacy streaming and media platforms are rebuilding their products around social participation because TikTok, not a rival streamer, owns Gen Z's attention.