Spotify looks to brands and advertising for a viable future

Recently I read a great post about Spotify on 'getting my socialmedia on'. Anna talked about falling in love with Spotify after discovering everything it does; streaming music, sharing with friends, supporting artists and cleaning up your mp3 files. Anna also discussed how Spotify works with advertisers. In the first instance they use banner adverts which seem to be the same as any other site: boring and predictable. In the second part they partner up with brands and apps. Anna posed the question of whether this could only work with music related brands. Although music related brands would be the obvious choice, I thought there would be scope for other brands to work with Spotify. As long as it was done creatively and in a relevant way for consumers.

So I looked into this further and learned that Coca Cola is becoming an increasingly important partner of Spotify. Coca Cola is a beverage company but clearly they are positioning themselves closely with music.  Spotify provides the perfect platform to facilitate this because it is all about social, sharing and aimed at the young hip market yet still has mass appeal. 

In Australia, Coca Cola are running a huge summer promotion where they offer consumers access to the top 50 tracks from any of the past 75 years. Coca Cola will rebrand their cans and bottles with individual years from 1938 to present. Consumers can scan a QR code on the bottle and access the top tracks from that year. Consumers will also be able to nominate any of their favourite songs from Spotify which Coke will combine into ready-made playlists for Spotify subscribers. Coca Cola Marketing Director, Lucie Austin, told The Australian "Coke's history has always had a strong link to music and we thought music choices are an incredibly personal thing. Also, people connect over music, people share it, they talk about it."

You can see the obvious benefit for Coca Cola by partnering with Spotify which gives them access to a revolutionary music platform. You can also see the benefit for Spotify. If the worlds biggest brand wants to be involved with you, then it should provide you with mass exposure, revenue and a degree of confidence. On the point of revenue, Spotify's biggest challenge at the moment is to create profit. While the growing investment of advertisers is helping them get there, Spotify say it is vital to convert a larger portion of free users into subscribers to ensure viable economics for the business.

In an effort to achieve this goal, Spotify are launching their first ever outdoor campaign in the UK. The campaign is called 'The mood of the nation'. What I love about their campaign is that it uses the Spotify service to gauge the mood of the nation through the music they are listening to on Spotify.  The billboards will reveal the regional variations of each cities listening habits.

Let me know if you like Spotify? I'd also be very interested to hear if you've seen great examples of brands working with Spotify in a much more creative way than banner adverts?