Ross Adams, Sales Director, Europe, at Spotify talks to Figaro about the success of the streaming music service and discusses the relationship between fans, bands, brands and marketing
Every now and then a service of such fantastic usefulness arrives that we can’t imagine life without it: Facebook, Twitter, Angry Birds for the iPhone. For music fans, Spotify has altered the landscape in ways which, a decade ago, would have seemed inconceivable. And yet, like so many developments which change the way we live online, in retrospect its success seems inevitable. Spotify was an idea waiting to happen.
Access all areas
Given the service’s dominance and ubiquity, it’s unlikely that Spotify needs any introduction, but we’ll give it a quick one anyway. Founded in Sweden in 2006 and launched in the UK in 2008, Spotify offers streamed music – free or through a premium-rate subscription as well as on its own download store – to over 10 million users. There are over 15 million tracks available and the service is growing at a rate of 20,000 new tunes every day, so whether you’re in the market for organ-disordering grindcore or Justin Bieber, Spotify has the goods.
Now available in 12 countries, it offers recommendations, playlists, full integration with Facebook and, in December 2011, the company announced plans to launch the service as a broader music platform, allowing users to access additional app content from brand partners including Rolling Stone, online music mag Pitchfork and the Guardian. With a deeply engaged, digitally-literate user-base, it’s among new media’s hottest darlings and the opportunities for brands as well as bands are extensive.
Ross Adams, Spotify’s Sales Director, Europe, was the third to join the UK team and recalls the early days when Swedish co-founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon began knocking on record labels’ doors in an attempt to secure licensing for what Adams calls “this crazy idea of free music. You can imagine how well that went down during those early chats.”
Since then, it’s fair to say, Spotify, has been instrumental in remodeling the way fans, artists, labels and marketers approach the business of music, shifting the emphasis away from ownership to mainstream access. That reflects a general change in attitudes towards the ways in which all sorts of content are distributed and consumed but, as Adams points out, at first the market itself required a bit of re-education.
“In the UK,” he says of the initial launch, “the response was: ‘free music – is this legal?’ People were worried about piracy. That’s still a massive topic, of course. The digital industry and record labels have had a tough relationship in the past, but we’ve proved that our model can work and we can be a very important revenue stream for those labels, especially in mature markets. We make access to music quicker, it’s better quality and we provide a bigger library in a legitimate environment - we’re changing the way the consumer acts and that can only be a good thing for the music industry.”
Open up
Anyone who’s spent a Saturday night re-engaging with forgotten goth albums or exploring free jazz will testify to a user experience that’s deeply personal yet profoundly social. Users are likely to be in a uniquely engaged and receptive frame of mind. “The thing about Spotify is we have a hugely passionate audience who are massively engaged with the platform,” says Adams. “You’re the DJ. You’re choosing the songs, it’s your music collection.” For brands on Spotify, he says, “there’s much more engagement with the user, much more recall, and the connection is much more emotional.”
According to UK MD and European Sales Director Chris Maples, Spotify’s policy when working with brands is always to recommend an additional media partner, and that flexibility is reflected in the recent announcement that external developers will be invited to create apps enabling users to access extra content, from buying gig tickets to reading reviews. The value of this approach? Users interact with the platform for longer. That means they can be served more display ads, and that in turn creates a greater inventory.
In November 2011 Spotify announced that it had racked up over 2.5 million paying users. Five hundred thousand of these came after the service set up its partnership with Facebook’s Open Graph. It’s this approach to Spotify’s API - the code that enables other sites to interact with Spotify’s database – which Adams believes holds the key to Spotify’s future as an integrated marketing tool. “The Facebook integration shows a really deep use of our API and that, I think, is going to really take off for clients.”
Sound and vision
There’s nothing new in the observation that music is inherently social. From hanging out in dusty record shops to lovingly crafted mixtapes designed to impress your mates, social media both mines and mimics modes of behaviour which have long been familiar to special-interest groups like music fans. By way of illustration, Adams points to some of the innovative approaches brands have brought to Spotify.
“VW Driving Track Confessions was a campaign that ran in Sweden,” he says. “And it’s a great example of how brands are using API. A series of ads ran on Spotify enabling users to confess to the cheesy tracks they most like driving to. The ad led you to a VW site where you could browse through all 15 million tracks. You made your choice and with one click you could confess your track to Facebook.” (Toto, Bon Jovi and Meat Loaf all featured prominently in the Swedes’ smorgasbord of cheese.)
“It started off as a fairly small campaign, but as it went viral we brought it into the real world. We had booths in VW showrooms where you could go and confess. Eventually we created a long playlist, and the top 10 most confessed tracks got turned into an MTV TV show, so it grew to a multi-media project.”
Nissan too, created an innovative, interactive campaign enabling users to remix a track by La Roux. The favourite version, as voted for by users, was then re-recorded by the synth-pop duo – with the winner – then performed live at London venue Koko and the concert
streamed via Spotify’s own player.
Campaigns like this bridge the traditional gap between fans and artists, and between artists and brands, and since music exists to be heard, they extend logically into the real world. Levis’ recent ‘Go Forth’ campaign featured a tie-up with Spotify, culminating with a performance by Primal Scream at the Electric in Brixton where users were able to choose the support act and Primal Scream’s own setlist.
These, of course, are big, sexy, rock ‘n’ roll campaigns designed to generate social chatter and friendly media coverage. Clipper Tea’s recent, low key campaign – made for minimal cost – suggested that with the right creative strategy, size need not matter. Broadcast between 10am and 1pm and targeted at women aged 25 to 40, it combined audio ads and display. Here a single click entitled users to 10 free tea bags. The call to action was simple, the process was accountable and for the brand there was a clear ROI.
Digital underground
As new technologies evolve and new platforms arrive, digital marketers will need to forge ever more personal relationships with users. Successful innovation will be founded on attraction rather than intrusion. The brands which work best within Spotify, says Adams, are those that echo and respond to the ways people actually use the platform. And as Facebook’s Timeline is rolled out, aggregations from services like Spotify will take on a long-term value not previously associated with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it world of social media. Just as sharing is the key to discovering new bands, so this sort of deep level engagement will only become more significant for brands.
Article by Jon Fortgang