Spotify Job Listings Suggest It's Building Smart Speaker

Music streaming service Spotify may already be working on its own smart speaker. A trio of job listings posted by Spotify suggest that the company is set to start manufacturing its new upcoming hardware product.

“Spotify is on its way to creating its first physical products and setting up an operational organization for manufacturing, supply chain, sales & marketing,” Spotify said on its “operations manager” job listing. Other hardware related job listings include “senior project manager: hardware production” and “project manager: hardware.” The job listings were first spotted by MusicAlly.

It’s being speculated that the hardware that the company is referring to is its very own smart speaker. Based on the job listings alone, it seems like Spotify is ready to start manufacturing its hardware product soon. Not much else is known about Spotify’s smart speaker. Rumors on such a device actually began way back in April 2017 when the company posted a job listing related to voice control functionalities, as pointed out by Forbes.

Currently, Spotify heavily relies on third-parties to come up with their own product that offer the company’s music streaming service. This includes the Google Home and the Amazon Echo smart speakers, and the various speakers from Sonos. There’s also Spotify Connect, that lets users stream music from different types of devices like the Sony PlayStation 4. Some home speakers and receivers also have the Spotify app built-in.

Meanwhile, Apple’s recently launched HomePod doesn’t have native Spotify support. This means that users won’t be able to ask Siri to play music from Spotify. Siri will only play tunes if users are subscribed to Apple Music. Spotify users can still use the HomePod to play music, but they will have to rely on AirPlay instead of giving convenient voice commands to Siri.

With Spotify being left out of the HomePod, it makes sense that the music streaming service sees a need to come up with its own hardware solution. Spotify is still the most popular music streaming service worldwide with over 70 million paying subscribers with 140 million active users. If it’s able to create its own hardware product, like a smart speaker, it already has millions of potential buyers.

If Spotify is really making a smart speaker, which digital assistant will be available on the device? Engadget speculates that it could support Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. Spotify’s smart speaker could also support both, like the Sonos One smart speaker. Whichever the case, there’s definitely a place for a smart speaker in the market that is dedicated to Spotify streaming.