Volt.fm Arrives to Improve Your Spotify Profile
Think Spotify Wrapped. Now take that wildly popular, yearly celebration of the music and podcasts you’ve streamed and give it a nice, big boost.
Volt.fm has arrived to facilitate that action — declaring its core mission as ‘Your Spotify profile on steroids.’
Available all year round, your Volt.fm profile is sharable with anyone, and you are able to receive monthly reports. You can also follow artists, playlists, and other users on Spotify.
The platform recently hit 100k users — a number sure to keep increasing as more people discover the product.
We recently caught up with Soheil Rashidi, the man behind Volt.fm, to get more details about Volt.fm and what to look forward to as he develops the platform.
P&S: What was the jumping-off point to start Volt.fm?
Soheil: I got the idea to build volt.fm right after Spotify Wrapped was released last year. I was really curious to know what my friends’ stats were and I wanted to show off my stats to them. Also, I always hated how boring my Spotify profile looked
So I thought maybe I could create a website where people could create a nice public page for their Spotify profile with all their stats, playlists, etc.
P&S: Have you heard from Spotify? If not, do you think you will at some point?
Soheil: Not yet. I am in contact with a few folks from Spotify so I know that they are well aware of volt.fm (they even showcased it on this year’s Spotify Developer Day). But I haven’t heard from them yet.
They seem to be more focused on podcasts these days. I’m working on some unique music discovery features, so maybe that would get them interested in some way.
P&S: What are your thoughts on the overall business of ‘music streaming?’
Soheil: I think we can all agree that music streaming is here to stay. As a listener, it has never been easier to have access to this huge catalog of music for such a low price. And as an artist, it has never been easier to make your music available to such a large audience for basically no cost.
The only unresolved issue is the low royalty rates that artists receive from their streams. I believe that will push artists towards new forms of revenue generation like selling access to exclusive content for the fans.
P&S: What has been the experience like in debuting Volt.fm? Any major hurdles you have had to tackle as you develop the platform?
Soheil: The only major problem so far has been fetching the listening data for this large number of users from Spotify. Spotify has a very low limit on how many times you can ask it for data. This has been particularly problematic during a few times that volt.fm has gone viral and a huge number of new users have tried to sign up at the same time.
But I’ve been told that this is changing and they will soon raise the limits for select apps after a review process.
P&S: What’s next for Volt.fm? Where is the platform this time next year?
Soheil: One area that I’m actively exploring is music discovery based on human recommendation and not algorithms and AI.
I believe there’s a lot that can be done in this area. I’m also very interested in helping new and emerging artists promote their music and grow their fanbase.
These are the two major areas that I will be working on in the upcoming months. And that’s besides adding new features like lyrics, artist/song trivia, and releasing volt.fm’s mobile apps.
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