Spotify’s Hardware Venture Sparks Speaker Rumors

Spotify, the music streaming service, is reportedly gearing up to develop its own line of hardware and has started creating the manufacturing process to churn out a series of products.

According to news in The Guardian, Spotify is aiming to create hardware products similar to the Pebble Watch, Amazon Echo and Snap Spectacles. The U.K. newspaper cited commentary Spotify included in a job advertisement that was posted online during the past year. According to the report, one ad for a senior product manager was looking for an expert able to “define the product requirements for internet connected hardware [and] the software that powers it.”

Meanwhile, in a trio of ads on Tuesday (Feb. 20), Spotify said it’s looking for an operations manager, a senior product manager for hardware production and a project manager for hardware production and engineering. In the first of the job ads, The Guardian said it stated: “Spotify is on its way [to] creating its first physical products and [setting] up an operational organization for manufacturing, supply chain, sales and marketing.”

Spotify declined to comment on the story.

If Spotify were to make hardware devices for its streaming music, it would be a departure from its past operations. Currently, it relies on third-party platforms to make its music available to users working on Amazon’s Echo, Sony’s PS4 and BMW 7 Series cars among others. At the same time, the company has faced pushback from some device manufacturers that don’t want to add the connect functionality of Spotify into their products. The Guardian pointed to Apple as one of the notable device makers that is giving the music streaming service a hard time. The absence of Spotify on Apple’s voice-activated speaker, the HomePod, resulted in criticism by reviewers, including The Guardian’s own Samuel Gibbs, who said “missing true Spotify support will be a deal killer for many.”