Introduction
Spotify is one of the most popular streaming audio services globally. Initially, the Swedish company, which was created in 2006, gained popularity gradually with the spread of the high-speed Internet connection that makes streaming audio available (Goldschmitt, 2020). Before individuals started downloading pirated tracks, which became problematic for the music business, Spotify was created to combat music piracy (Goldschmitt, 2020).
As a result, the company’s founders considered it as an opportunity for the development of Spotify. Nowadays, Spotify is the balanced solution for listening to music online without violating copyright licenses. The choice of content marketing strategies allows the company to attract new clients and retain old users. Therefore, Spotify is an online streaming musical service that provides access to a vast library of tracks on a free and monetary basis, and its content marketing strategy makes it popular.
7Cs of the Company
Competition
Existing online music services like iTunes and Napster compete with Spotify, but as this is a developing market, more significant rivals should be anticipated. For instance, Apple acquired the Beats music subscription service in 2014, while Google introduced its Music Key subscription service on YouTube in the same year (Goldschmitt, 2020). Prime Music subscriptions are now available to Amazon loyalty program members (Goldschmitt, 2020). Spotify is more popular than the services mentioned above due to its positive reputation.
Customer
The service is available globally, meaning people of distinct cultural backgrounds and demographics use it. Spotify’s target market primarily comprises younger Gen Z and Millennials, with a slight majority of female users and a geographic concentration in the U.S., Europe, and Latin America (Durham, 2020). Despite this, Spotify’s extensive user base spans 184 distinct markets and nations (Durham, 2020). This variety highlights the value of user customization, enabling Spotify to craft an experience for every customer unique to their listening patterns and musical tastes.
Communication
When communicating with clients, Spotify typically appeals to human emotions to increase customer loyalty and engagement. Emotion is an effective marketing strategy, especially in the music industry. Spotify bases a significant portion of its business model on individuals’ emotional connections with music (Durham, 2020).
Since many people connect music to feelings of nostalgia and reminiscence, Spotify, for instance, launched a feature called “Playlist in a Bottle” this year that allows users to curate a musical time box that will be revealed the following year. This nostalgic feature, which makes users wait the next year to unlock their playlist, effectively locks users into a one-year Spotify subscription while offering social sharing capabilities.
Culture
The capacity of Spotify to take advantage of the social and network effect on listening patterns is the cornerstone of its retention approach and culture. After registering for a Spotify subscription, a user joins a broader community of Spotify users and experiences a sense of community through playlists created by friends, comparisons of their Spotify-highlighted top musicians, and playlist creation (Durham, 2020). Users are more inclined to keep paying for Spotify if it can help them feel like they belong to the community and can interact with other people by using the social sharing aspects of the site.
Convenience
Spotify offers the public a freemium music service, which means that while the essential functions are always accessible, there will be commercial breaks. It is convenient for most users who want to get acquainted with the service without subscribing. The listener should purchase a subscription to access additional benefits and not listen to the commercials. It is widely used worldwide and works with Linux, iOS, Android, and Windows operating systems, which is also convenient (Goldschmitt, 2020). As a result, there are no problems using the streaming audio service in all corners of the world due to its accessibility and extensive music library.
Consistency
The terms of Spotify are predictable for clients, and using the service is understandable. With its freemium business model, Spotify charges $9.99 per month for an ad-free and unrestricted premium service, while its primary benefit is free (Goldschmitt, 2020). With this freemium business model, Spotify has the advantage of being able to draw in a lot of new customers by offering a free service, then, after building a good rapport with them, convert those people into paying members.
Customization
As has already been mentioned, Spotify uses personalized recommendations for every user. Its content marketing is focused on customization, and clients receive individual playlists, suggestions, and features related to particular events. For instance, Spotify developed the “Spotify Blend” function, a daily-updated playlist that mixes the music the client and a different individual listen to according to their shared musical tastes (Goldschmitt, 2020).
The service emphasizes that music is frequently considered a place for communication and connection. Spotify went further for Valentine’s Day, enabling users to assess their musical preferences with those of a partner or love interest and view their customized taste-matching rating (Goldschmidt, 2020). This message fits well with the sentimental nature of music, and Spotify encourages more interaction and viral spreading with this content marketing idea.
Content Marketing Effort Evaluation
Spotify has always led the way in customization based on personalized recommendations. They have a vice president of personalization position specifically for this purpose. Spotify uses machine learning to decide what music and playlists appear on a user’s home screen based on their past listening habits and actions. To maximize the final, long-term benefit customers receive from the service, reinforcement learning, or the R.L., is then utilized to forecast what a user might like to listen to (Drott, 2020).
A new A.I. DJ function from Spotify was just released; it provides a hand-picked playlist, spoken artist, and track annotations (Drott, 2020). With the introduction of this new A.I. feature, Spotify begins to resemble a more laid-back, passive listening experience that relies more on the platform’s recommendations than on deliberate user selection (Hanlon, 2022). Users are training the A.I. to perform better each time they play or pause a song, laying the groundwork for ongoing customization and enhanced recommendations.
A new mobile U.I. designed for more profound discovery was one of the key announcements made by Spotify this year. Like Instagram or TikTok, consumers can browse suggested podcasts, brief canvas snippets, and new album artwork in a vertical scroll. This significant modification to the product design indicates a broader movement towards a more discovery-focused model, in which customers find fresh releases and tracks that match their preferences in music and enjoy the music they already appreciate (Hanlon, 2022).
In other words, Spotify is now more than just a service for streaming music; it is trying to solve the problems it had in recent years with fake streams and click farms (Drott, 2020). Spotify incorporates aspects from TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube into its new interface, making it a more comprehensive experience that includes album artwork, videos of brief duration, and sound.
It is significant to note that Spotify might attempt to address the podcast problem they have been experiencing lately with this more discovery-based strategy. Spotify invested more than $1 billion in the podcast industry when it bought podcast production company Gimlet Media in 2019 for an estimated $230 million and bought The Ringer network in 2020 (Drott, 2020). Despite the significant expenditure, Spotify’s podcasts have yet to become lucrative, and the company does not entirely represent this sphere. The vertical scroll discovery structure provides users with an additional way to find new material and enables content creators to share and advertise their work on the platform. It will become clear whether this discovery model resolved Spotify’s podcast issue shortly.
Another content marketing campaign Spotify uses is based on the desire of people to share their musical tastes on social media. Since its debut in 2016, Spotify’s “Spotify Wrapped” ad campaign has taken over social media every December (Goldschmitt, 2020). Because of its immense popularity, the movement has become a yearly ritual or a significant event for ardent Spotify listeners.
Apart from being extensively disseminated on social media, Spotify Wrapped has become the focus of many memes, parodies, and imitations. It evolved from a marketing campaign to a widely shared social phenomenon, and it soon gained notoriety as the best illustration of both the influence of social media trends and contrived virality (Goldschmidt, 2020). Spotify Wrapped was developed to give users a chance to commemorate a year of listening by revisiting songs that they enjoy, musicians, and styles and to gain a deeper understanding of their musical preferences. The social sharing habits were taken into consideration when creating Spotify Wrapped.
Apart from its widely popular Spotify Wrapped campaign, Spotify is an adept tech firm that uses many social media marketing strategies to promote its platform. Their social media approach is based on the idea that listening to music should not be restricted to the Spotify app and should be a cross-platform experience (Hanlon, 2022). Spotify made a strategic and practical decision to make each interaction on the app easily shareable on many social media sites. 42% of Gen Z Spotify subscribers in the U.S. claimed to have heard the tune on social media and subsequently looked it up on Spotify, based on data from internal research conducted by the company (Goldschmitt, 2020). Spotify must improve its cross-platform presence and facilitate easy music search in light of this enthusiastic social media music exploration activity.
Conclusion
Spotify has had great success with its marketing approach in recent years, and its data supports this claim. Spotify has 489 million monthly active subscribers, which shows the service’s popularity (Goldschmitt, 2020). However, customer conduct and listening habits are dynamic fields that are constantly evolving. Spotify needs to adapt to meet the varied demands of today’s contemporary clients unless it hopes to keep its current user base and continue to be successful (Hanlon, 2022). It is possible to recommend the company pay more attention to working with podcasts, which is the developing sphere at this moment, and to find the aspects that make Spotify different from the rivaling services to improve the content marketing effort.
References
Drott, E. (2020). Fake streams, listening bots, and click farms: Counterfeiting attention in the streaming music economy. American Music, 38(2), 153–175. Web.
Durham, B. (2020). Circulatory maintenance: The entailments of participation in digital music platforms. American Music, 38(2), 197–216. Web.
Goldschmitt, K. E. (2020). The Long History of the 2017 Spotify “Fake Music” Scandal. American Music, 38(2), 131–152. Web.
Hanlon, A. (2022). Digital marketing: Strategic planning and integration. Los Angeles: SAGE.