Spotify introduced Car Thing to the World Earlier in February. It launched at a price tag of $89.99 in the US and promised to offer more control and freedom than using your smartphone while driving. The idea was good; it was fairly cheap, but failed to get off the ground, and it’s now discontinued.
The Spotify Car Thing was available for a while, but people had to be invited to buy one. The invitation system was eventually ditched in February when the company made it officially available on its website. The Car Thing came with all the necessary accessories and tools to mount it in cars, but it required a separate Spotify Premium subscription to play music. It was aimed at hardcore Spotify users, who wanted to take their music experience to another level.
Spotify today announced its quarterly results, showing the company grew its monthly active user base by 19%, reaching more than 433 million users. However, the company missed its gross margin, saying it was “negatively impacted by our decision to stop producing Car Thing”.
A spokesperson told TechCrunch that “The goal of Spotify’s Car Thing exploration was to better understand in-car listening and bring audio to a wider range of users and vehicles. Based on several factors, including product demand and supply chain issues, we have decided to discontinue further production of Car Thing units. Existing devices work as intended. This initiative has provided useful lessons and we remain focused on the car as an important place for audio.
The good news is that Spotify plans to service already purchased devices, though it’s unclear how long they’ll function as intended. The other good news is that this has helped Spotify do more research into how people listen to audio while traveling and commuting. Hopefully that will help the company improve its new one Auto mode functionwhich is still not rolled out to all users.
What’s next for Spotify?
It’s almost certain that Spotify probably won’t start a new hardware venture anytime soon, but one thing is for sure. Spotify has learned a lot from launching a hardware product specifically aimed at drivers. The company has invested a lot of money in researching and designing this product. We can only hope that this will speed up software development for the company’s Car Mode feature.
Source: Pocketnow, via 9to5Google
For those who don’t know, Car Mode is the successor to the discontinued Car View function. Once turned on and the smartphone recognizes that it is connected to a car’s audio system, it displays a larger user interface to facilitate navigation and use while driving – ideally stationary or parked on the side of the road.
The Auto Mode feature has not been available in all regions and does not resolve all issues as it still requires a physical or wireless connection to connect to a smartphone. However, Android Auto and Apple Car Play had the Spotify app available for a long time, and the discontinuation of Car Thing leads us to believe Spotify will invest even more research, time and money in improving the application and service on those platforms. Hopefully this will result in fewer distractions, and we’re also hoping for better integration of Google Assistant, Siri, and Amazon Alexa for voice control. Speaking of voice control, we’d also like to see Spotify roll out widely and improve its own assistant feature, which offers most of the same functionality as the best-known voice assistants.
By rolling out a native Spotify voice assistant feature, smartphone users can switch songs and navigate to different playlists without getting distracted and taking their eyes off the road. While Google, Apple and Amazon offer their own smart assistant functionality, Spotify’s native could offer even more benefits at a faster speed.
Spotify Car Thing is currently discounted at $40 to get rid of the remaining shares. This might be the best time to buy if you want to buy one for $49.99.