New and Digital Media #19

Spotify debuts 'dark' redesign ahead of competition from iTunes and YouTube

Streaming service has new look and Your Music collections, but bigger beasts are preparing to enter market

Streaming music service Spotify is rolling out a redesign across its web, desktop and mobile apps, with a darker theme and new feature for users to build collections of their favourite music.

The revamp comes ahead of the anticipated debut of rival services from Apple and YouTube, possibly as soon as this summer. Meanwhile, one of the most prominent critics of Spotify, musician David Byrne, has returned to the theme in an article questioning streaming's sustainability for artists.

Spotify says it spent six months working on the redesign, which is rolling out to its users from today. The new theme is heavy on black backgrounds, in an attempt to place more focus on album and artist artwork.

"It's like when you go to the cinema, and they dim the lights, and the movie steps forward and takes over the room," Spotify's director of product Michelle Kadir told The Guardian. "When you log on to Spotify now, everything else is secondary except the music, which is popping."

The new collections feature is called Your Music, and enables people to save songs and albums to a personal collection, providing an alternative to playlists – the traditional way that Spotify users have saved music for quick access.

The Your Music section on Spotify can be browsed by songs, albums, artists or local files – the latter relating to music stored on the device being used. Individual songs in Spotify now have '+' symbols next to them for adding them to the collection, while albums have a prominent 'Save' button.

"The modern user wants to personalise all the different products that they are using. We want to help them quickly find what they want," said Kadir. "Even in an access model, they want to keep track of everything they like."

Your Music has been a long time coming: it was first trailed by Spotify in a press event in December 2012. It can be seen as an attempt to make the company's catalogue of more than 20m tracks less intimidating for mainstream music fans by mirroring the idea of a personal music collection, which they'll be familiar with from CDs and MP3s.