Tag: spotify

What Starbucks Is Teaming Up With Spotify For

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Wired

Starbucks and Spotify announced a new partnership to bring the music streaming service to all of the coffee chain’s U.S. retail locations this fall, the two companies announced earlier this week. As a result, every Starbucks U.S. retail employee will receive a Spotify Premium account for free, which will be used to curate music playlists in stores. Moreover, Starbucks customers who have signed up for its rewards program will be able to influence in-store music programming, and they can also earn Starbucks rewards points by paying for Spotify.

Without a doubt, this partnership will help promote Spotify’s premium service in Starbucks stores across the States. Starbucks has long been a major force in the music business, selling millions of exclusive albums in their stores. In addition, the Seattle-based company has a long-standing partnership with Apple to promote iTunes store and app download. Now with Apple readying its own Beats-based streaming service for launch, it’ll be interesting to see how this partnership will impact the music industry.

 

Streaming Music Gets More Personal With Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: AdWeek and AdAge

Music streaming services like Pandora and Spotify are enhancing the way that they target ads by getting more intimate with listeners. Spotify announced that it will allow brands to target specific consumers through custom playlists based on user activity and preferences. Ideally, the streaming company will be able to infer the context in which people are listening to playlists to deliver the perfect ad. Similarly, Pandora is moving closer toward programmatic advertising by allowing brands to target users based on more specific demographics like the users’ declared age, gender, and location, showcasing the wealth of targeted data they can provide brands.

Apple’s Music App Is Getting “Spotified”

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: 9to5Mac

Earlier this week, Apple released the first developer beta of iOS 8.4, giving the world a first look at its long-rumored redesign of the Music app. And with its all-new interfaces and improving queuing features, the new music app may easily remind users of the Spotify app.

With the announcement of Apple’s streaming music service expected at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference starting June 8th, the revamped music app also puts Apple’s current music streaming service iTunes Radio front and center, with other design factors that heavily hint at further integrations of streaming functionality.

Why Jay-Z’s Tidal Might Just Work

Posted on by Lab Team

Tidal, a new premium streaming service helmed by Jay-Z, arrived yesterday with a star-studded press conference in Manhattan. Jay-Z, who brought the Scandinavian lossless streaming service for a reported $56 million, firmly believes in Tidal’s power to disrupt the music industry, but the initial reaction so far has been largely skeptical, if not downright hostile.  Yet Tidal may still stand a chance.

First and foremost, Tidal has gained the support of musicians and music creators alike by putting the artists’ benefits before record labels. Jay-Z used his industry clout to get a long list of A-list stars—the one percent of music industry—to get on board. Those big-name performers form the core branding, and the celebrity aura they bring to the service will draw music fans to it.

Furthermore, the streaming model has made it almost frictionless to switch between services. Since these music creators control the content, should they choose to play hardball, they could easily pull a “Taylor Swift” and yank their catalogue off free-to-use streaming service like Spotify, pushing fans who has grown used to streaming music to pay up when there’s no more free options available.

Last but not least, there have been precedents for a price-sensitive market suddenly disrupted by masterfully marketed premium products. A recent example is how Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine successfully convinced millions of consumers that their basic white iPod earbuds weren’t good enough. Like Beats, Tidal might just find a way to make high-fidelity audio cool and upsell music streaming subscriptions.

 

Head image taken from tidalhifi.com

 

Sony Adds Spotify Integration

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: Wired

Sony announced that it’s replacing its existing streaming music service, Sony Music Unlimited, with a new Spotify-powered service called PlayStation Music. With the Spotify partnership, Sony acquires not only an immense library of music, but also the infrastructure to infiltrate the increasingly competitive streaming music market. The new service is set to launch some time this spring on the PS4 and PS3 game consoles, as well as on Sony’s Xperia smartphones and tablets.

On Trend: Music Streaming Growing Strong Despite Swift Boycott

Posted on by Richard Yao

One of the biggest stories in media this week has been Taylor Swift abruptly removing all her back catalogue from Spotify, sparking debate on the monetization strategy and shifting audience behavior of today’s music industry. Some artists have voiced their support for Swift’s decision and criticized the unfair compensation granted by streaming services.

Although Swift’s current popularity may let her defy media consumption trends, the move from ownership to subscribed access seems all but inevitable, as Spotify royalties have reportedly overtaken iTunes earnings by 13% in Europe.

Impressive as that sounds, Spotify still got beaten by Pandora in App Annie’s new Music App Index report released today, which ranked the latter as No. 1 among music apps for most downloads and monthly revenue with a reported $100 million in mobile ad revenue for the recent quarter.

Both services, however, might need to watch out for SoundCloud, an up-and-coming challenger who just signed a licensing deal with Warner Music Group. In an effort to alleviate the tension between musicians and digital music services, the deal mandates that Warner artists will get paid when all versions of their music, including the D.J. remixes and fanmade mash-ups, are played on SoundCloud.

All in all, one could say that music streaming services are taking the “breakup” with Taylor Swift pretty well.

Why Taylor Swift “Broke Up” With Spotify

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: The Guardian

Backed up by her record-breaking album sales, Taylor Swift and her label have made a bold decision to remove her back catalog from Spotify. Tension between musicians and streaming services over low royalties (reportedly around $0.007 per play) has been brewing for quite a while, but it took something as strong as Swift’s popularity and negotiating clout to break away from the increasingly influential streaming service. Unlikely to spread to other artists in the music industry, this incident may just be one of the growing pains for Spotify.

Is SoundCloud Turning Into Spotify-lite?

Posted on by Lab Team

Following yesterday’s news that Snapchat is planning to add ads to its offering, SoundCloud, the popular audio-sharing platform, is now launching an ad-supported On SoundCloud program to let music and podcast creators monetize the audio they post. The program will have users “see and hear” commercials alongside sponsored tracks. In addition, it announced plans to launch a subscription service to allow listeners to opt out those ads. Essentially, it’s slowly turning into Spotify-lite, just with fewer music licenses. And as long as it doesn’t annoy the users, its popularity will pay off.

Can Brands Get Better Engagement On Messaging Apps Than Facebook?

Posted on by Lab Team

Messaging apps are the “The New Face of Social Media,” but how do they compare to the old guard when it comes to organic reach and engagement?

Last week Tango, a messaging app with 200M+ users globally and close to 70M in the US, launched brand Channels– and initial results give a glimpse into the looming battle between messaging apps and Facebook / Twitter.  The numbers (assuming they’re accurate) are surprisingly impressive for an opening week, with companies like Spotify racking up 119,000+ followers, bands like OK Go gaining 124,000+ fans, and a curated Feedly “World Cup News” channel netting 233,000+ subscribers.

Brands on Tango often get better engagement on posts than they do on Facebook, even with infinitely smaller fanbases.  Spotify’s Father’s Day post, for example, asked users on Facebook and Tango to fill in the same blank “Tell us: I listen to _________ because of my Dad,” and yielded 7,625 likes and 1,114 comments on Tango vs. 1,749 likes and 2,369 comments on Facebook.  With 4.5M more Spotify fans on Facebook than Tango, the neck-and-neck results may speak to decreased organic reach on Facebook and high engagement on Tango.

Tango Facebook 1

A closer look at fan comments, however, reveals that quality of engaged users on Spotify’s Facebook page is much higher. While Facebook fans thoughtfully answered the question by naming artists,  Tango comments include a fairly high concentration of random emojis,  troll-like statements like “BITCH WHO DO YOU LOVE?,” and other off-topic ramblings.

What Tango does best is organize channels by topic to facilitates discovery.  They even tally total followers by category, making it easy to glean what appeals most to the user base: Music (286,000+ followers), Sports (276,000+ followers), Tango Updates (134,000+ followers), Funny & Cute (118,000+ followers), Entertainment (58,000+ followers), and lastly News (36,000+ followers).

In our messaging app white paper we cautioned against replicating Facebook and Twitter content on messaging apps. But in Tango’s case, they’ve appropriated the classic social media news feed, so understandably brands aren’t getting creative like they might on open platforms like Kik. Tango’s initial focus is also on content creators, with no traditional brands like Coke or Pepsi entering the fray yet. Given the success off the World Cup News channel, brands should consider exhibiting creativity by curating a channel tied to music or sports instead of (or in addition to) a standard brand page.

As the summer progresses, expect more brands join Tango to access its 200M users, which means more competition for eyeballs.  We may also witness the first few brands with 7-figure follower counts, inevitably turning heads in the broader marketing community.  For now, Tango Channels is off to a promising start.

Beats Music Offers Big Exclusives To Compete With Spotify

Posted on by Lab Team

When Beats Music announced its streaming music service, many wondered how it would be able to compete with the likes of Spotify and Pandora, the industry heavyweights. Now we have a better idea; after their acquisition by Apple, Beats Music is using its industry clout to gain access to big exclusive singles, like Jay-Z’s remix of “Jungle.” Though Spotify has about 40 times the number of subscribers, Beats has the brand names – and now, it also has industry exclusives to lure new users.