Spotify’s getting serious about its enterprise and dev tools business play
You know that mildly jarring experience whenever that well-known celebrity shows up in an entirely different context — e.g. a musician making a horror flick cameo; an NFL player rearing their head in a comedy series; or a Hollywood movie icon selling mobile phone plans on TV? Well, it’s starting to feel like that with Spotify’s foray into the enterprise and developer tooling space — nothing wrong with it per se, but it makes you flinch just a little due to its divergence from the norm.
What we’re talking about is Backstage, a platform and framework Spotify introduced internally in 2016 to bring order to its developer infrastructure. Backstage powers customizable “developer portals” that combine tooling, apps, data, services, APIs and documents in a single interface. Want to monitor Kubernetes, check your CI/CD status, or track security incidents? Backstage to the rescue.
Lots of companies construct their own internal systems to help developers work more efficiently. And lots of companies release such systems to the public via an open source license to spur wider adoption, as Spotify did with Backstage in 2020. But it’s highly unusual for a consumer technology company to actively monetize this side of its business, which Spotify has been doing since 2022.
