Dive Brief:
- Pandora is expanding its Artist Marketing Program (AMP) that gives musicians and their representatives access to audience-building tools, as well as methods of measuring audience engagement and ways to sell things like concert tickets to listeners.
- Artist Audio Messages, for example, will play before or after tracks on a Pandora station, and are geo-targeted; Featured Tracks lets artists release new singles and receive immediate feedback from fans; and Ticketfly gives listeners an opportunity to buy concert tickets within set location boundaries.
- Ariana Grande is a marquee artist using Pandora’s AMP according to Avery Lipman, president and co-founder of Republic Records, in a release. Lipman said Grande recorded a series of Artist Audio Messages to support her recent “Dangerous Woman” album rollout to encourage pre-orders, achieving an 8.1% clickthrough rate — what Lipman said was a 5 to 7x increase over what his label saw for social and paid channels.
Dive Insight:
Pandora often seems an underdog compared to paid music subscription services like Spotify, but recently it has been increasing efforts to be a more marketer-friendly platform with better integrated sponsored videos, and is now trying to reposition itself as an image-building tool as well as a concert vendor by ramping up AMP.
Having Ariana Grande as the face of AMP is a smart move, emulating the way many brands use influencers on social media to target hyper-specific demos, and particularly younger groups like millennials.
“AMP is proof of Pandora’s commitment to improving the lives of musicians and supporting our industry. It’s the most targeted and efficient set of promotional tools available and it helps us reach a massive audience,” Lipman said.
Even though AMP is designed to help musicians market themselves, it’s likely Pandora will be using the channel to find new ways for brands to reach those same artists' considerable fan bases. Streaming music services like Pandora and Spotify offer marketers a unique set of data to draw on, garnered from playlists and users' emotional attachments to music.
Pandora has even been working with Moat to create a new metric for audio ads tentatively called “audibility,” likened to the “viewability” metric that marketers are already familiar with for digital display and video ad formats.
