‘A proxy for personality?’: How Spotify is using music data to understand how its users behave
As marketers look to make more of their data, music streaming giant Spotify shared how it is taking people’s habits on the platform and turning it into actionable insights.
While many organisations struggle to corral and verify the data for their customers, streaming platform Spotify has the opposite problem – how to make the most of a lot of verified first person data.
Globally the streaming platform has now passed 140m users, all of whom have to be registered and logged in to use the service, with every one having a unique experience courtesy of the music they choose to listen to.
As Richard Frankel, the global creative director of Spotify, told the Mumbrella360 conference: “We have moved beyond demographics to reflect the person behind the device. It’s one thing to know who your audience is, and another to understand them. And when you intimately understand them, that’s when you can dynamically evolve effective marketing strategies.
“So we’re really not thinking about a single audience of 140m people, in our world we’re serving music experiences to 140m audiences of one. Every single Spotify user has a unique experience.”
This data has allowed the company to map how users behave on the app and build out new products and services. However, Spotify believes they can also start to predict the future behaviour of these users, by using it to determine their personality type.
One data set they are dabbling with is the Discovery streaming habits on the service, which measures how much users listen to new music and how willing they are to hear things they’ve never heard before on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Frankel explains: “So if you discover a lot of new music you’re what we call an explorer, and if you’re happy with the music you listen to a lot you’re what we call reliable.”
The second facet they are looking at is the diversity of music people listen to.
“That measures the range of music you’re listening to and measures things like genre and tempo,” explains Frankel. “Listening to music from a wide variety of genres makes you an eclectic, and listening just to soul music or jazz you’re a loyalist.
“Is this a proxy for personality? We think it might be.”
The next element of listener behaviour being investigated by Spotify is one they have invented, called Tilt.
Frankel explains: “This measures how much people are actively curating their streaming experience. Think about the way you tend to listen, do you lean in, are you curating your music?
“Curators have the app in the foreground and are manually controlling the songs. If you just like to queue up a playlist, put the phone in your pocket and put the sound up and let it play you’re an Easy Goer.
“We’re using all of this data and some third party sources to go deep into these ideas to see if we can ratify the observations our data science teams are making about this stuff, and we’re releasing a big white paper called Understanding People Through Music which will get into it in a much deeper way.”
The streaming giant is also starting to investigate other facets of listening they think can help them map user’s personalities, including Nostalgia and Obsession.
He also points to the Spotify for Brands website which already has some tools allowing marketers to deep dive on certain groups based on their musical habits.
The brand has also started walking its own walk, using the data to help them “find our own voice” with their consumer facing marketing to attract new users to the platform.
“We do a thing at the end of the year which is a bit of fun, it’s Your Year in Music,” explains Frankel.
“These are graphical wrap ups of everything you’ve listened to that year. In 2015 we told you the first song you listened to that year, which for a lot of people triggered a really important memory, then we told you about the songs and genres you listened to and cared about, what you listened to most, what you listened to each season of the year and why that mattered, and where you fitted in in the city you live in and the globe at large, relative to the world of listening.”
But the marketing team realised while that was a good tool for talking to everyone who was already on Spotify, those insights could also be used to create a bigger campaign, breaking down the areas of New York City and delivering some insights to them.
“Instead of giving them this report we decided on an out of home campaign where we put up what happened in that place,” explains Frankel.
The insights showed things like artist The Weeknd being popular in the ‘cooler’ neighbourhood of the East Village, while the older neighbourhood of Soho saw Janet Jackson and Stevie Wonder as the most played artists.
However the team hit the real insight when looking at ‘hipster Mecca’ neighbourhood Williamsburg.
Frankel says: “Imagine our surprise when it turned out the most played song in this hip Mecca in the middle of New York was a Justin Bieber track Sorry. So we bought the largest single piece of outdoor real estate we could find and said ‘Sorry,not sorry Williamsburg. Bieber’s hit trended highest in this zip code’.
“We were just being good reporters, making charts and graphs and reporting back as to this is who you are. And this was a way in for us, we suddenly thought let’s go beyond taking the musical temperature and start making some actual heat.
“There are very few places for non-users to feel the value and personality of our brand. If Spotify is made for fans by fans it’s our community that makes it unique, but if you’re not already in how do you know you’re missing out.”
This led to the idea for the team to “create culture in our own community and report on it”.
“The underlying strategic mission was this idea of ‘have you heard’? Take a cultural moment, something that’s happening in the real world and look at how the Spotify community has reacted to it by mining the data, and looking at their listening history, see if there’s a relevant story that has the right attitude, and tell it.”
It led to a much wider campaign for the brand at the end of 2016 which ran across several countries showing how the community was listening.
In London the brand pointed out how many people had streamed ‘It’s The End of The World as we Know it’ on the day of the Brexit vote, while in Williamsburg someone listened to the song Broccoli 513 times, leading to the slogan: ‘We get it, you’re vegan’.
“The by fans and for fans positioning really includes fans,” explains Frankel. “By celebrating our users in the same way we show love to artists, we make a bigger statement for Spotify to reinforce the brand equity to current users and makes the kind of FOMO centric noise to attract new ones.”
While Spotify is only in the early stages of managing its unique pool of verified first-person data and detailed knowledge of how user behaviour it has already started to create insights to help advertisers on and off the platform. With more detailed analysis to come the streaming player may well have tapped into a rich source of data that will enable smart marketers to get deeper and more personal with consumers than ever before.