X marks the Spotify
Young STAR finally has its own Spotify account. Check out playlists by YS editors that are perfect for Saturday road trips or 2 a.m. sound trips. Put your records on and follow us @YoungStarPhils.
MANILA, Philippines - At first we thought modern technology had already made everything possible for us when McDonald’s online delivery became a thing. You gotta admit, after that, everything else that followed was simply a nice bonus.
It wasn’t until Spotify came into our lives that we began to wonder if that’s still true. Launched in 2008, the app allows users to legitimately stream music from major record labels and build playlists of their own from the millions of songs in its database. All of this is for free, by the way, with premium subscriptions offered to those who might want to listen to their music offline and nix the advertisements that occasionally pop up.
Spotify only came to the Philippines in April 2014, but was met with a response that its creators did not expect. “It really hit the ground running,” says Spotify’s managing director for Asia Sunita Kaur during her visit to Manila. “The adoption was quick. In just four months, some of the trends we were seeing are phenomenal. One of my favorites is the number of playlists that are being created. We’ve bypassed one million playlists in the Philippines alone. It’s amazing.”
As a response to the dynamic musical curation in the country (mostly by millennials, says Kaur) Spotify has had to add at least 20,000 tracks to their catalog per day. “Coming to the Philippines also meant that we needed to have a very strong OPM base,” Kaur says, noting that Filipinos primarily loved playing and creating playlists that involved local acts such as the Eraserheads and Sarah Geronimo.
With a constantly growing library and the possibility of more storage (as Spotify merely lends you the music, not to download), it’s hard to figure out what it is that Spotify can’t do. Then again, there is still that burning question on everyone’s minds: Will the free subscription ever allow more than six skips in an hour? Kaur answers with an easy laugh, “Who knows? Everyone should stick around and see.” — Margarita Buenaventura 
