The reinvention of radio: how Spotify, Beats 1, Red Bull changed the airwaves

Spotify have announced two new shows with presenters. Is this an attempt to steal a march on Apple’s Beats1 and Red Bull’s RBMA Radio – or is it the savviest way of guiding listeners round an endless landscape of music?

The music and technology industries worship the sparkle of the new. If something is described as “new” or “the new [insert name of existing format or platform here]”, there is the conveyance of a commendable sense of modernity; a feeling of momentum propelling us all forward. New is good. New is utopian. New also, sadly, takes a long time to make its presence felt or make a difference.

Alongside this is the idea of the “answer to”, which always presumes that a question has been asked when more often than not it hasn’t. Android is “the answer to iOS”, Twitter is “the answer to Facebook” and Snapchat is “the answer to Twitter”. It’s a longstanding Silicon Valley trick that is repeatedly used to raise seed funding and Series A investment; present your new product as the thing that solves a nonexistent problem inherent in something else, using that something else as a form of shorthand to define your own product against. Hence nonsense like “[name of new company] is the Uber of Pinterest” sloshing around countless investment PowerPoints.