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Spotify sales boss says there’s still work to be done on educating agencies and brands about music streaming

Music streaming is in its infancy from a brand perspective, and there’s still some work to be done educating agencies and brands, Spotify’s sales boss Andrea Ingham has said.

Ingham, who spoke at a media briefing alongside Spotify’s global head of partner solutions, Danielle Lee, said while the company is always trying to keep brands and clients educated about how to best maximise value from the platform, the education progress is quite slow.

Ingham presenting at Spotify House in Sydney yesterday

“When you look at the average age of a marketer in Australia or even in agencies they’re understanding that a millennial experience and there’s a lot of nodding go in the house but I think sometimes someone thinking about that put together as a whole piece for their brands, they don’t always connect the dots,” she told Mumbrella.

“So what we wanted to do was really connect the dots about how you are reaching people as they move through their lives.

“There’s definitely still work to be done and it’s happening slowly probably slower than we would like.”

Her comments come as the music streaming service launches its Spotify House event, which seeks to educate media on the streamer’s intelligence services and teach brands how they can use data to enhance experiences.

Earlier on in the morning, Lee explained to the audience how the process works: “We collect billions of data points every day and that’s what has powered our user experience, that’s how we are able to deliver these personalised playlists. We use machine learning to really personalise these experiences and we call our data streaming intelligence because it’s really about what we learn about people through the way that they stream music.”

Ingham speaking with Spotify’s global head of solutions, Danielle Lee

The presentation follows the revamp of the Spotify free experience, which allows user control over 15 playlists, data savings features and personalisation from initial sign up.

“There are a lot of options brands for these days in audio. Audio is quite unique particularly for digital and digital. Traditionally it’s been video display and bringing audio into that – it is a different medium. Audio is very emotive,” she said.

Everything we’re trying to do is always be about the best consumer experience and by providing the best consumer experience, brands can get the best return on investment.”

Spotify is one of the only major music streaming services in Australia with a local office. Last year, Pandora became the eighth streaming services to shut its local office doors.

According to Ingham, Spotify’s hybrid model – both ad supported and subscription – has helped it thrive. She refuted the idea non-paying subscribers weren’t engaged.

“We have the best ad blocker in the world and it is a premium experience a subscription experience,” she said.

But she added: “What we found as well is we’ve done some research, and people understand that they can’t have all that access for nothing.”

Ingham is also adamant Spotify has a completely separate offering for brands.

“When you look at radio which is probably the most obvious audio platform for brands, we are very very different and the way that brands can use us is quite different and because people are listening through headphones, brands can use 3D audio, and you get that kind of cinema sound through the headphones so that’s very unique to digital audio and particularly Spotify, which is one of the only about mass digital consumer experiences brands can advertise on.”

As of December 2017, Spotify has 90 million ad-supported supported users along with 71 million paid subscribers.

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