The advert for a hardware product operations manager was posted on Spotify's recruitment site today, and sits above recent ads for two project managers within hardware production and engineering, as spotted by Music Ally.
As well as working "with partners to deliver the optimal Spotify experience", the new employee will "manage product vision… [and] contribute in the creation of innovative Spotify experiences via connected hardware".
We’d bet a good portion of our brimming stockroom that at least one of those ‘physical products’ turns out to be a wireless speaker of sorts – perhaps a smart speaker to boldly rival the Apple HomePod, Amazon Echo (and Echo Plus) and Sonos One, although we doubt it’ll be powered by Spotify’s own answer to Siri, Alexa or Google Assistant.
And if that’s the case, which voice-control provider would it license?
Perhaps the product range will include a pair of Bluetooth headphones? Or a Spotify-only streaming device like the Mighty?
Whicever direction it heads, Spotify will no doubt be entering a hardware market with tough competition. But it needn't worry about reaching out to an audience (the music streaming service has 140 million active users, after all) - especially if its products have access to exclusive streaming service features.
Admittedly we have more questions (among the more burning of which is: will the products be green?) than answers at this stage - and, considering the project appears to still be at recruitment stage, it could be some time before that changes. Perhaps by then, Spotify will have finally dived into CD-quality streaming.
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