https://carthing.spotify.com $89.99 for a single-purpose, semi-obsolete music streaming device. I’d love to understand what the target market is for this device? Seems to me that most cars have some form of Bluetooth or CarPlay wireless connectivity which allows a phone to play music from the Spotify app. It only streams from Spotify and just passes the connectivity through from your phone. The price point indicates a premium market which is already swamped by smartphones. What is the purpose, I am probably missing something? Edit: It’s so much worse than expected. It offers no new connectivity, you connect your phone to your car and the device to the car. It’s essentially a hardware controller for the Spotify app when driving…
Older cars with only auxiliary audio, perhaps? Does it have aux out? I could see that maybe if their phone doesn't (which many don't now). But if it's just Bluetooth, Android Auto (or Car Mode) on Android phones are way more useful. I would imagine Carplay probably has a similar feature too. Edit: Nope. This thing is literally just a control knob and extra display for your phone's Spotify app.
It says Aux and USB connectivity which is great but I was thinking why not buy a lightning-aux cable or similar dumb connector? I don’t think that audio conversion needs an active component
Oh must've missed that detail. Anyway yeah, just use Carplay or Android Auto on your phone and you get Assistant + Nav + Messaging etc. Kinda pointless
It literally needs to be connected to a 12-volt outlet and your phone. You good Spotify?
Haha so you can get Joe Rogan in your car, and can’t hide it because they refuse to have a do not recommend feature on their app, even though it’s just another fucking button on their app, and it’s so easy to update a recommender system with negative feedback, Jesus I hate Spotify
Check out CNET review on this on YouTube, will give insights who the target audience is
I am also trying to make sense of it. Maybe they are trying to target asian, african, and middle eastern regions where a large number of people drive used cars. But still why would they use this instead of their phone? Maybe they are thinking drivers will prefer a dedicated screen over the built in system. Seems to me a hard sell. Or they are experimenting with building a separate ecosystem!
It completely relies on your phone to be connected to the car so the car being new/used doesn’t factor in since its all about the phone connectivity. Very hard sell especially considering the price and the single use
Actually its only available in the US 🤠
I've used one, and know people on the team. The controls are really nice and improve driving/music experience. Main thing here is to bridge between people who don't have displays. The other big thing is that it will be better at voice control, it has microphone arrays and a chip trained to activate to "Hey Spotify". When you use Google or Alexa the recommendation system is sometimes worse than our internal recommendation. Your phone won't activate to Hey Spotify unless if the app is running. Same thing if you try to use Hey Google on a non Android etc. This isn't designed to be a new long-term market. We are aware that more and more cars have capable displays. Until then we think this will be safer and easier to use.
Thank you for some Spotify opinion, I truly am curious about this product but I know it wouldn’t exist without doing market research. It targets people who don’t have displays in their car, which would indicate an older, less expensive car, but is priced at $89.99 which seems counterintuitive to me. I knew Spotify had their own voice assistant but never knew it had advantages against the larger, more general voice assistants, i’ll have to check it out. Are you saying the “Siri, play X type of music” will give a less accurate result than saying the same with “Hey Spotify”? I would have thought that entering a shrinking market that also shrinks with time as all cars age, would be a bad thing.
I recently had a chat with someone on the team that builds the device: When you use Siri or any other voice assistant (btw also applies to Alexa) you are fully dependent on the provider. Eventually they decide what commands you can use and what music will be played (and which data they share with you). And since all of them have their own music service they have an incentive to make the experience with Spotify a bit - but noticable - worse than with their own service. Running our own voice assistant means we can 100% understand what's happening from the data, add new commands as needed and further improve the experience over time. About the shrinking market: If that market is still big enough for many years to be viable then entering the market can still make sense. And a lot of people on the internet need to learn to look outside their bubble: Just because they and their tech friends can afford to buy a shiny new car with the newest entertainment system every year doesn't mean that this is true for the average American. Agree that the 90 bucks don't make this a no-brainer and will probably keep some people from buying it. As far as I understand from the team this is a compromise between price and quality: Cheap enough to be affordable, good enough to be useful. Time will tell if that bet is going to work out.
Spotify’s intro into product line? That might be it.
Up next, Spotify Headphones, which will only work on the Spotify app :)