With all of the focus that people put on social networks and mobile platforms, many other services and mediums that are highly popular today tend to be put on the back burner. Something that most marketers do not pay very much attention to is music sharing. Music sharing networks are used constantly today, and see enormous amounts of recurring traffic. It is of course understandable that music sharing websites and services do not receive much attention from marketers, as the marketing opportunities that they have put forth in the recent past have not been much to get excited about, aside from some of Pandora’s advertising features. However, a relatively new name in music sharing, Spotify, is now talking about take its first steps toward offering something real to potential marketing customers.
According to an Ad Age article, after a Spotify announcement that included appearances from such names as Lars Ulrich of Metallic and Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster, which subsequently served as something of a root for all music sharing to grow out of, an interview delved a bit deeper into the intentions of Spotify in the near future. The Chief Advertising Officer at Spotify, Jeff Levick spoke of opportunities that marketers might find in the new features that the company announced at the New York media event on Thursday.
The new feature that was the subject of Spotify’s announcement is called “Discover,” and it allows for users to look over songs, playlists, artists, and videos that they may not have discovered yet. It is similar to Pinterest in a design sense, and it provides more of a personalized profile kind of functionality for users of the music sharing service. Based on the past preferences of users, new music to discover will show up on the “Discover” page. It is not a concept that we have never seen before in social media, but for music sharing services, it is relatively unique.
Here is a bit of what Levick stated in the interview with Ad Age:
“It’s another new canvas for us to look at the right way for brands to participate in the music experience.”
“Ads can be and should be about content and we plan to use this content-rich experience to let brands test out new things.”
With the adding of a visually focused page design to Spotify, a lot of opportunity opens up for marketers that want to tap the vast traffic that the company has. The new Spotify feature is supposed to come into the digital world after the New Year, and it is then that brands should start considering the company’s new feature as a potential place to veer away from display ads and see what advertising on a popular music sharing and discovery service will bring to the table.
The service currently has around 5 million paying subscribers around the globe, and 1 million in the U.S. who pay for the service. The majority of users, about 15 million of them, use the service for free, which means that they opt into being shown advertisements as they listen to music.
