Spotify Takes on Apple Fitness+, Fitbit With New Guided Workout Experience

Spotify on Monday marked its foray into the guided workouts space with the introduction of the “Fitness with Spotify” experience. The Swedish music streaming platform is rolling out structured fitness content, guided sessions, and wellness-focused media into its existing ecosystem of music, podcasts, audiobooks, and video. This potentially puts Spotify in more direct competition with Apple Fitness+ and Fitbit. The new feature is rolling out to both free and Premium users, with additional content available to subscribers through partnerships.

Spotify Fitness Experience: Features, Peloton Integration

The new update brings a dedicated Fitness hub within the Spotify app. It includes curated workout playlists and guided sessions across categories such as strength, cardio, yoga, meditation, and recovery. In a blog post, Spotify said that it has onboarded several wellness creators, including Yoga with Kassandra, Chloe Ting, and Pilates Body by Raven. These offer structured content alongside the existing audio library.

As part of the rollout, the music streaming platform has also partnered with US-based exercise equipment and media company Peloton to bring a catalogue of more than 1,400 on-demand classes to Premium users. This will be available in supported markets. Spotify says its ad-free classes offer guided workouts ranging from outdoor runs to mat-based training sessions. Such sessions are led by instructors such as Rebecca Kennedy, Ally Love, and Rad Lopez.

As per the platform, this content does not require specialised equipment and can be downloaded for offline use. Further, the company aims to offer seamless usage across devices. This means users can start a workout video on a TV, switch to audio on their phone during a run, and continue with recovery sessions on a smart speaker without leaving the app.

Spotify said its latest expansion builds on existing user behaviour, with more than 150 million fitness playlists already active globally. The company also claims that nearly 70 percent of its Premium users engage in workout-related activities on the platform each month.

The Fitness hub can be accessed by searching for “fitness” within the Spotify app or navigating through the Browse section. While most workouts are currently available in English, select sessions are also offered in Spanish and German.

With this move, Spotify potentially competes with Apple Fitness+ and Fitbit. However, it has a slightly different approach. Apple Fitness+, notably, is closely knit with Apple devices within its ecosystem. On the other hand, Fitbit also relies on wearable-driven health tracking. This means both of the services require dedicated hardware in some form or another. Meanwhile, Spotify is leveraging its content ecosystem and cross-platform accessibility to offer fitness experiences without requiring dedicated hardware.