What you need to know
- Spotify is rolling out an update to the mobile app that enables support for 36 additional languages.
- It's part of Spotify's recent move to expand support internationally.
- The company announced the addition of over 80 new countries to its catalog last month.
It's going to be a lot easier to use Spotify now — no matter which country you are or the language you speak — once the company is done with its early-2021 updates. It announced an expansion to over 80 markets across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America last month. This month it's rolling out an update to its mobile app that'll include support for 36 new languages.
Writing via blog post, the Spotify team shared:
The new languages are already available on the web platform, and today they will begin to roll out on the mobile app. The expansion brings the following to Spotify: Afrikaans, Amharic, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Bulgarian, Simplified Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Estonian, Filipino, Gujarati, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Norwegian, Odia, Persian, Portuguese for Portugal, Eastern Punjabi, Western Punjabi, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swahili, Tamil, Telugu, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Zulu.
Spotify's competitors like YouTube Music and Apple Music have catered to localized tastes for a year or two. YouTube even took advantage of their competitor's absence in the market to capture the hearts of customers with plans aimed at markets where phones trend cheaper.
However, that absence could also have ended up creating pent-up demand. Spotify's launch in Russia last year was able to catapult it past the 300 million user mark, and the company has only grown since then. If that's an indicator of anything, given the breadth of this upcoming launch and the number of markets included, Spotify is about to have a very good 2021.
