It wasn't pointless. Spotify's whole existence depends on moving from background listening to active foreground use.

It would be pointless for them to stay an passive background app. Might as well shutdown the company and cut the losses.

I saw it as a sign that they needed to find ways to get people to spend time listening to anything that is proprietary (podcasts, unique recommendation algorithms) to avoid just being the middle man for music streaming and getting squeezed by the publishers for all their revenue.

Edit: By proprietary I mean - owned by Spotify.

The music is propertiary. Even recordings of Mozart is unless the recording is older than an ever increasing limit of a bazillion years.

Yeah but it's not owned by Spotify, at least the most popular music isn't. I mean: they want you to listen to things they own, not things they license.