Dive summary:
- Spotify, the popular social music streaming service, is in talks with brands to create a Twitter-like follow feature on their service.
- The feature would allow brands to market to users by allowing them to share playlists and other activities; it is the marketing equivalent of what Spotify rolled out to artists, record labels, media companies and regular users earlier this year.
- Spotify is also brainstorming how brands can reach subscribers to the ad-free paid version; branded playlists are one way, but Spotify hasn't been able to monetize the practice yet.
From the article:
"Spotify is also looking at how it can enhance ad targeting beyond age, gender and geo-location to potentially include interest-level information, giving advertisers the ability to reach people who listen to certain genres or even specific artists. As Google and Facebook have demonstrated, letting advertisers target ads more granularly based on proprietary data can boost a company's ad revenue as tighter targets command higher prices per impression. And marketers may be willing to pay a premium for those ads on Spotify if they can target users who listen to a band that's featured in the brand's TV campaign -- not dissimilar to how advertisers can supplement their TV advertising with a Twitter campaign tied to the shows in which the ads air."
