Spotify’s Driving Features: A Bump in the Roadmap

Matt Miller

Customer Success Manager

May 21, 2024

At Enterpret we are in the customer feedback business. We help companies understand what customers say in real time, mostly through internal surveys, reviews, and support tickets. Sometimes, we enjoy scraping public data to test our models and see what we learn.

For our latest edition, Spotify was an obvious choice. Spotify has legions of dedicated listeners who provide high volumes of public feedback across the Apple App Store, Android Play Store, and X (formerly known as Twitter). X can be pretty bursty, with big spikes when threads go viral, such as in December when thousands of K-pop fans bombarded the Spotify account asking for a “This Is V” playlist for the BTS alum. K-pop fans completely overwhelmed our models, leading to a mess of duplicate reasons. (The playlist has since been created, if you were wondering.)

‍

Anomaly Detected: Car Mode Feature Disappears

This spring, when we dug into the data to start writing this blog post, it didn’t take long to notice that there was an interesting customer feedback reason for the spike in volume—Car Mode was gone. (Enterpret’s Anomaly detector identifies statistically significant increases in volume based on previous time periods to help companies pinpoint surging topics.)

Anomaly: Issue With Removal of Car Mode Feature

‍

A History of Spotify’s Driving Features

We decided to dig deeper - it’s been stop-and-go in the past few years for Spotify’s automotive features.

Driving Features v1: Car View and Car Thing

In October 2021, users noticed that the familiar Car View, a simplified interface meant to make it easier – and safer – to control music or podcasts while driving, had vanished from the app.

Car View was very basic, just a simplified, scaled-up version of the player screen:

Spotify soon confirmed that this disappearance was intentional, with a representative writing, “Think of retiring Car-View as something that needs to happen in an effort to make way for new innovations coming down the track.”

Users whose cars had screens that could work with a car-play app like Android Auto or Apple CarPlay had an alternative, but plenty of people were left in the lurch. Some called foul, suspecting that the feature discontinuation was meant to push them to buy Spotify’s “Car Thing” (yes, that’s the name), a dedicated device with a screen and a simple interface for manipulating playback controls on the road. The Car Thing had been introduced in April of that year. While some premium users had been offered a free one, everyone else would have to shell out $89. Womp womp.

Driving Features v2: and Car Mode

Fortunately for everyone, this was not, in fact, a big ol’ ploy to get users to buy the Car Thing. Within a few months, Spotify announced that Car View would be replaced by Car Mode, an expanded version of the concept. This was not a backtrack or a slapdash replacement, but it meaningfully built on the original by adding additional screens (like a playlist/album view) and introducing voice control.

After August 2022, Car Thing quietly ceased production, and balance was restored to the universe—well, until this spring.

‍

Present Day: Removal of Car Mode and a Possible Safety Issue

Back to the present and the spike in volume, we saw this month about the Removal of Car Mode. Users were not pleased about the change, pointing out that the removal made the app not only less convenient (e.g., keeping the screen from going to sleep) but less safe. Trust the trucker guy – he does a lot of driving.

There doesn’t seem to have been any warning or clear confirmation of the change. Users saw it vanish at different times based on their operating system and when they updated it.

I contacted Spotify support and after a confusing back and forth with the chatbot, a human told me:

At Spotify, we’re always looking for ways to make listening more seamless, wherever you are. There are multiple ways to enjoy listening to Spotify in the car and of those options, we found that Car Mode doesn’t offer a better in-car user experience. As a result we’ll be retiring it. To find out more about the different ways you can continue to listen to Spotify in the car, check out For the Record.

It seems like you’re out of luck for the moment if your car doesn’t have a built-in dashboard screen. Though I guess you could try and buy a used Car Thing; apparently, they go for pretty cheap these days 🥴 Safe driving, everyone.

‍

Want to read more posts like this?

See our deep dives on:

Or if you want to chat about getting a custom model built so you can do more with your feedback, get in touch!

‍

Wisdom saves me hours every week. With 'Summarize with Wisdom,' I can condense feedback with a single click, replacing the tedious process of reading through hundreds of tickets. It’s life-changing!

Jil McKinney

Director of Customer Support, Descript

Before Enterpret, organizing research data took an entire day. Now, research synthesis is 83% faster - it takes just 15 minutes to pull the data and another 15 minutes to start synthesizing. Enterpret removes the manual work, allowing me to focus on strategic thinking with a clear mind.

Mike McNasby

User Research Lead, Descript

We are laser-focused on giving customers more than they expect through a hospitality-first, individualized approach to drive retention and loyalty. Enterpret has allowed us to stitch together a full picture of the customer, including feedback and reviews from multiple data points. We now can super-serve our loyal customers in a way that we have never been able to before.

Anna Esrov

Vice President of Customer Experience & Loyalty

Enterpret allowed us to listen to specific issues and come closer to our Members - prioritizing feedback which needed immediate attention, when it came to monitoring reception of new releases: Enterpret picked up insights for new updates and became the eyes of whether new systems and functionality were working well or not.

Louise Sellars

Analyst, Customer Insights

Enterpret is one of the most powerful tools in our toolkit. It's very Member-friendly. We've been able to share how other teams can modify and self-serve in Enterpret. It's bridged a gap to getting access to Member feedback, and I see all our teams finding ways to use Enterpret to answer Member-related questions.

Dina Mohammad-Laity

VP of Data

The big win-win is our VoC program enabled us to leverage our engineering resources to ship significantly awesome and valuable features while minimizing bug fixes and" keep the lights on" work. Magnifying and focusing on the 20% that causes the impact is like finding the needle in a haystack, especially when you have issues coming from all over the place

Abishek Viswanathan

CPO, Apollo.io

Since launching our Voice of Customer program six months ago, our team has dropped our human inquiry rate by over 40%, improved customer satisfaction, and enabled our team to allocate resources to building features that increase LTV and revenue.

Abishek Viswanathan

CPO, Apollo.io

Enterpret's Gong Integration is a game changer on so many levels. The automated labeling of feedback saves dozens of hours per week. This is essential in creating a customer feedback database for analytics.

Michael Bartimer

Revenue Operations Lead

Enterpret has made it so much easier to understand our customer feedback. Every month I put together a Voice of Customer report on feedback trends. Before Enterpret it would take me two weeks - with Enterpret I can get it done in 3 days.

Maya Bakir

Product Operations, Notion

The Enterpret platform is like the hero team of data analysts you always wanted - the ability to consolidate customer feedback from diverse touch points and identify both ongoing and emerging trends to ensure we focus on and build the right things has been amazing. We love the tools and support to help us train the results to our unique business and users and the Enterpret team is outstanding in every way.

Larisa Sheckler

COO, Samsung Food

Enterpret makes it easy to understand and prioritize the most important feedback themes. Having data organized in one place, make it easy to dig into the associated feedback to deeply understand the voice of customer so we can delight users, solve issues, and deliver on the most important requests.

Lauren Cunningham

Head of Support and Ops

With Enterpret powering Voice of Customer we're democratizing feedback and making it accessible for everyone across product, customer success, marketing, and leadership to provide evidence and add credibility to their strategies and roadmaps.

Michael Nguyen

Head of Research Ops and Insights, Figma

Boll & Branch takes pride in being a data driven company and Enterpret is helping us unlock an entirely new source of data. Enterpret quantifies our qualitative data while still keeping customer voice just a click away, adding valuable context and helping us get a more complete view of our customers.

Matheson Kuo

Senior Product Analyst, Boll & Branch

Enterpret has transformed our ability to use feedback to prioritize customers and drive product innovation. By using Enterpret to centralize our data, it saves us time, eliminates manual tagging, and boosts accuracy. We now gain near real-time insights, measure product success, and easily merge feedback categories. Enterpret's generative AI technology has streamlined our processes, improved decision-making, and elevated customer satisfaction

Nathan Yoon

Business Operations, Apollo.io

Enterpret helps us have a holistic view from our social media coverage, to our support tickets, to every single interaction that we're plugging into it. Beyond just keywords, we can actually understand: what are the broader sentiments? What are our users saying?

Emma Auscher

Global VP of Customer Experience, Notion

The advantage of Enterpret is that we’re not relying entirely on human categorization. Enterpret is like a second brain that is looking out for themes and trends that I might not be thinking about.

Misty Smith

Head of Product Operations, Notion

As a PM, I want to prioritize work that benefits as many of our customers as possible. It can be too easy to prioritize based on the loudest customer or the flavor of the moment. Because Enterpret is able to compress information across all of our qualitative feedback sources, I can make decisions that are more likely to result in positive outcomes for the customer and our business.

Duncan Stewart

Product Manager

We use Enterpret for our VoC & Root Cause Elimination Program. It's helping us solve the issues of aggregating disparate sources of feedback (often tens of thousands per month) and distilling it into specific reasons, with trends, so we can see if our product fixes are delivering impact.