Has it been suggested to have a Device Priority list? I'm sure I'm not the only person driving around all day listening to Spotify only to be kicked off because my 3 year old decided to listen to the Frozen Soundtrack on her iPad at home. Spotify is a digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs. Unfortunately, no carrier currently offers free Spotify. AT&T once offered Spotify Premium for free to customers on their now defunct Unlimited&More Plan. If you are a heavy Spotify users, or your top priority with data usage is streaming music, you might want to consider a Boost Mobile plan.
Back in 2012, Spotify was still a new player in the field of music streaming. Before 2012, Spotify was giving its services was free and there was no Premium model. Many famous music artists criticized the company for being an unwelcome disruptor of the entertainment industry. In an interview with Wall Street, Taylor Swift, one of the world’s biggest country-pop singers, explained her decision to withdraw her songs from Spotify in 2012:
In my opinion, the value of an album is, and will continue to be, based on the amount of heart and soul an artist has bled into a body of work, and the financial value that artists (and their labels) place on their music when it goes out into the marketplace. Piracy, file sharing and streaming have shrunk the numbers of paid album sales drastically, and every artist has handled this blow differently.
Taylor SwiftMultiple artists supported the notion. Because of Spotify’s controversial modes of paying artists for their contribution to the music streaming site. In particular, Spotify functions as a “Freemium” application which allows the free consumption of music by all with the only limitation being the existence of audio advertisements in between songs. Many artists saw this as a subtle form of piracy and an infringement on their rights to be paid for their efforts in producing good music.
With the negative press received from these music artists back in 2012, Spotify did not let this deter them from making breakthroughs. Instead, Spotify went on to implement digital marketing strategies that skyrocketed its business. The real question is, how did Spotify manage to achieve such a feat despite the backlash?
Spotify’s Selling Strategies for it Premium Service
Spotify’s initial advertising ( launched in2008) was kept on a small scale. It was relying mostly on invite-only, co-marketing, and PR strategies instead of large scale advertising campaigns.
In fact, what really sets Spotify apart from other streaming sites like Apple Music is its ability to implement accurate and effective target segmentation strategies in its digital marketing campaigns.
1. Targeted Advertising by Spotify for Free Subscription Users
Spotify leverages largely on its influx of freemiumsubscribers. Through word of mouth and digital ads, these subscribers download the application. Mainly because they are attracted by the idea of free streaming music.
However, Spotify’s success in converting these freemium subscribers is high mainly because audio advertisements (promoting the premium version of Spotify) are slotted in between the streaming of songs for these users. The motivating factor to purchase premium usage of Spotify lies in the idea of subscribing so that one can remove the annoyingly repetitive ads which disrupt their music experience on the application.
Today, Spotify is the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service with 299m users, including 138m subscribers, across 92 markets. Following graph from Statista shows the rising number of subscribers on Spotify.
There are other ways Spotify increases its number of premium users from its freemium users. Firstly, they restrict the use of the ‘skip’ button on the application for freemium users and secondly, Spotify allows Freemium users to experience the ad-free version but they would have to view short video advertisements in order to unlock this benefit.
2. Website Design Targeting Millennials
Once again, Spotify demonstrates its ability to capture the hearts of a niche audience through its website and application design. Its design is mostly clean, minimalistic and easy to navigate.
Spotify’s homepage almost always features the prominent tagline “Music for Everyone” which conveys a clear message and sets a clear benefit for potential subscribers. That Spotify has all types of music customized as per individual needs. The vibrant colors employed by Spotify on its website attracts the young and energetic millennials, a group very reliant on streaming music for entertainment.
Furthermore, Spotify usually promotes its freemium service below this tagline rather than its premium service. We can immediately see how strategic Spotify is in its marketing plans. The priority is to rapidly increase its freemium users and eventually, through in-app experiences, convert these freemium users into its loyal, premium users.
3. Spotify Blog and Community Pages
To further strengthen the loyalty of its niche crowd, Spotify has created an online digital community through its blog and community pages. The community page serves to allow music fans to connect all over the world.
On its community page, Spotify advertises its premium service. Possibly with the hope that when these music fans feel a connection with others due to the interactions in this community, he or she will be inclined to sign up for the premium service.
After browsing through Spotify’s community blog, one may also realise that its blog posts are mainly targeted to the young crowd, offering them bite-size information about the music scene, pop culture and even student discounts.
4. Advertising Campaigns Targeting Millennials
In the past few years, Spotify has also stepped up its game by introducing ad campaigns to attract the millennial crowd. Spotify’s campaigns rely mainly on pop culture references, song lyrics and humour to attract the young crowd.
For example, in 2017, Spotify introduced its biggest advertising campaign, ‘2017Wrapped’. The campaign involved creating personalized playlists for its current users as a gift to its users during the holiday season. To access their playlists on Spotify, emails were sent out to each user.
What‘s next for Spotify as a business?
While Spotify has already established itself as a frontrunner in the music streaming industry, I believe there is still more potential for Spotify to spread its reach through social media advertising.
One clear gap in Spotify’s digital advertising strategies is its use of major social media accounts like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Looking at its current Instagram account, Spotify has a total of 5.9 million followers.
If we were to consider the previous statistic of Spotify having 299 million active users, 5.9 million followers is a mere 0.6% of its total users and does not seem like a reasonable number. Spotify’s other social media accounts have also reflected this trend.
If Spotify wants to truly dominate the music streaming scene, it has to expand its reach to a variety of target audiences. Social media reach is integral in doing so. Because it fits into Spotify’s identity as an app which is all about bringing together communities of people. People who are passionate about sharing their love for specific types of music.
Interested in reading more Marketing Strategy Stories? Check out our collection.
Also check out our most loved stories below
IKEA- The new master of Glocalization in India?
IKEA is a global giant. But for India the brand modified its business strategies. The adaptation strategy by a global brand is called Glocalization
How Bata became India’s household name despite being a classy international brand?
Bata is not an Indian brand. It is as international as it can be. But what strategies made it India’s highest selling footwear brand?
Nike doesn’t sell shoes. It sells an idea!!
Nike has built one of the most powerful brands in the world through its benefit based marketing strategy. What is this strategy and how Nike has used it?
Domino’s is not a pizza delivery company. What is it then?
How one step towards digital transformation completely changed the brand perception of Domino’s from a pizza delivery company to a technology company?
What advertising strategy made TITAN an iconic watch brand?
What are the various advertising strategies that make Titan a consumer’s choice? How did Titan decide to choose Mozart’s symphony as its tune for commercials?
WhatsApp “Photo Status” was a strategic move. How?
Whatsapp launched photo status in 2017. It was hated by many. But why it was a good move that improved the way you use application today?
In June 2015, the service reported 75 million active users, of which 20 million were on a paid plan (that’s over 25%). Recently, their chief revenue officer shared that they were on track to hit the 100 million active user mark before the end of 2015. Consumers have adopted the Swedish service en masse, with Scandinavian countries leading the way, followed by the rest of Europe and now the rest of the world. By allowing people to experience the platform for free through their ad-supported freemium model and over-delivering on user experience, Spotify’s initial growth was largely driven by word of mouth instead of advertising.
Now, having captured the majority of market share in Europe and with the competitor Apple Music entering the scene, Spotify has attracted more venture capital and is beginning paid advertising campaigns to win users in territories such as the USA.
This is interesting for artists and labels alike, as it means that streaming is now getting more exposure than ever.
Contents
Personally, I’m a fan.
Download Spotify Songs To Mp3
Two years ago I started using Spotify, immediately subscribing to a paid plan after discovering the smooth user experience, nice interface, large catalog of music and ability to stream at 320kbps MP3 quality (yeah, Netherlands mobile networks rock).
Before, I had been an iTunes kind of guy, downloading music and syncing it to my iPhone to listen on the go. It worked, but the process was far from optimal – because of the set-up time of downloading and migrating the files to my phone, in reality, I ended up listening to the same collection of music for extended periods of time.
The switch to Spotify reminded me of my initial migration from Windows to OSX… awkward at first but much more efficient once I got accustomed to the interface.
The new paradigm
I think the popularity of streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music and even Netflix are symptoms of a new paradigm: accessibility over ownership.
Consumers prefer easy access and a comfortable user experience over actually owning products and services.
After all, why would you purchase CDs if you can stream high-quality music on your desktop or smartphone, with your whole collection being accessible cross-device and have the option to sync for offline listening? It’s simply a better user experience.
Sure, some people still purchase CDs and vinyl because to them nothing beats the experience of having a physical product. Others still purchase CDs or download lossless quality files because the audio quality is better. Both are valid arguments, I get them, however percentage wise this is just a minority of all the music listeners.
Streaming is changing the game and with Spotify being at the forefront, I wanted to dedicate a post to talk about how you can get the most out of it.
Getting your music on Spotify
You can view Spotify as a store similar to iTunes and Beatport, falling in the category of DSPs (digital service providers).
To get your music up on the platform, you need to make sure you have all the rights (no unofficial remixes, uncleared sample usage, etc). From there, you will need either a direct distribution deal with Spotify (reserved for large record labels) or a connection with a distributor or aggregator that does.
For those of you unclear about the distinction, an aggregator is a company that provides distribution services to a large user base, supplying the content to multiple digital service providers (DSPs) (iTunes / Spotify / Beatport / Apple Music etc).
Distributors essentially do the same thing, but at a smaller scale (fewer clients with bigger catalogues) and work closer with specific record labels and artists and can assist in facilitating marketing placements on the stores.
![How to download songs from spotify How to download songs from spotify](/uploads/1/3/3/9/133910984/411672139.jpg)
In terms of the time it takes for your music to be live on the store, Spotify is one of the quicker DSPs and depending on your distributor’s processes, your music can be up on the store within 1-3 days after delivering the content.
Spotify royalties
There’s been a lot of fuss in respect to Spotify’s royalty payments.
Firstly you will have to understand the difference between the freemium and premium models. The one is free to use and shows ads (display and audio) to users, whereas the premium model is ad-free and requires a monthly fee.
Plays are not treated equal on the platform. Plays of premium users result in a higher payout to rightsholders than those of freemium users. Spotify cant stream local files to phone have to download.
How it works – roughly – is that Spotify takes all the subscription (premium) and advertising (freemium) revenues over a said period, dividing those monies by the total amount of streams.
Rightsholders are paid out based on those rates and from what I understand these are corrected by the percentage of plays that came from the freemium / premium users (so larger % of streams from paid users = higher royalty rate and vice versa).
Of course, that imposes a problem.
With their tremendous growth, going from 60m active users of which 10m paid in late 2014, to 75m active users of which 20m paid in mid 2015, the growth of free users is larger than paid users, thus diluting the per-stream royalty rate.
The more users Spotify acquires, the lower the per-stream royalty rate, unless the paid-to-free subscription ratio maintains or rises. It’s like inflation.
The rates are also influenced by the country of which the streams originate (because of territorially dependent advertising buys and currency value) as well as the price of paid subscriptions, which may vary because of discount and package deals.
Spotify officially reports their average composite per-stream rate to be between $0,006 and $0,0084.
Our rate with Heroic over 2015 Q3 was approximately $0,00475 per stream, without including any distribution fees. This is the pure rate we received from Spotify via our distributor. For clarity, these are Spotify royalties over the master.
For songwriters it is different. Internationally, parties have decided to consider a stream roughly 75% public performance and 25% mechanical reproduction. Spotify pays these rates on behalf of the label (by withholding it from the master royalties) and allocates it to the PRS’ whom in turn collect for the publishers or songwriters directly.
These rates are much lower, with some songwriters reporting receiving roughly $0,00009 per stream. That’s $90 for 1.000.000 plays.
Nonetheless, Spotify is becoming a significant revenue stream for record labels and performing artists. With Heroic, we’ve seen Spotify’s share of our distribution income shift from 10% to over 55% in the last two and half years.
Pair that up with a decrease in iTunes (Apple is pushing consumers towards their Apple Music streaming service) and Beatport sales (their new streaming service is terrible, the pro.beatport.com store is confusing and SFX stock has plummeted) and you can see how streaming is going to account for the lion’s share of (digital) recording revenues in the coming years.
Playlists
The biggest driver of plays on Spotify are playlists and charts.
These are lists that are curated by both consumers and companies, which list tracks that they enjoy. Spotify’s playlists are cool because when you follow one, you’ll get a notification every time a track is added to that playlist. That’s what drives the plays.
Every user has the ability to create playlists and retitle them, however the ability to customize artwork and add a description is restricted to VIP / verified accounts.
In the past Spotify allowed users to discover playlists of other users via the browse sections of the app, however, these playlists have been removed and only those controlled by Spotify and the major labels are now shown.
Yeah, there’s a monopoly going on there.
Because Spotify’s success hinges on their ability to use the music of the major labels, there have been intense negotiations and the majors have managed to negotiate higher-than-standard royalty rates and control over a share of the advertising space and playlists on the platform.
Most users don’t realize this, but all those popular playlists that don’t carry the Spotify brand are all controlled by the majors: Filtr is owned by Sony Music, Digster by Universal Music Group and Topsify by Warner Music Group.
This control allows them to influence (Spotify) chart positions, plays on their tracks and improve the success rate of their releases beyond Spotify (improving odds on Shazam, general charts, radio and other DSPs).
So you’re wondering: how do I get my music on those playlists?
Great question – with an unfortunately complex answer. Because the biggest playlists are controlled by a few established parties, penetrating the market can be difficult.
Nonetheless, here are your options.
Spotify’s self-controlled playlists:
You’ll either need a contact at Spotify, or more realistically, a deal with a distributor or aggregator that does.
Ask them about how you can file for a ‘priority track request‘ or what is also called a ‘feature placement‘. This constitutes the distributor filling in a form with Spotify where they outline the projected sales figures for the release, as well as the artist’s historical sales figures and a summarized marketing plan.
![Spotify Spotify](https://cdn.onerpm.com/images/marketing/Marketing_FeaturedPlacements_03 ThisIs_Playlists.jpg)
Spotify then decides whether to place you or not. Success is largely based on the validity of your story; sales numbers, outstanding marketing campaign, proper label backing. It’s important to have both your label and distributor double down if you really want to make this happen.
Record label playlists:
Release with one of the major labels or bigger independents that control their own playlists. Labels such as Spinnin and Armada are doing a great job at playlisting in the electronic realm.
Leading up to your release, ask them about how they will employ their playlists to generate traction with your release. You may even want to ask them to run a Spotify exclusive for 1-2 weeks leading up to the release, if they think it will increase your odds of being included in one of Spotify’s primary playlists via a priority track request. Spotify free download.
Independent playlists:
With Spotify removing independent playlists from the Browse section, tracking the best independent playlists can be a struggle.
Here’s a few methods to find them:
- Search for popular keywords (think Tomorrowland, EDM etc) and filter through the results, filtering out those with the most followers (anything with 5.000+ followers is significant).
- Search Google for lists of the most popular playlists. Like this.
- Or use websites that index Spotify playlists such as Playlists.me and SharedPlaylists.com.
From there, the process is straightforward: trace the account that created the playlist and employ your best internet researching skills to find a way to contact the playlist creator (usually via email, Twitter or Facebook Chat).
Catalog your results in a Google Sheets database. Here’s a template that you can use (copy the tab to a new Sheets document to get started).
Analytics
Similar to other streaming platforms, metrics are important to both see how your releases are performing, as well as to better understand your demographic (where they are based, when they listen etc).
You can view the play counts of tracks on Spotify by hovering over the battery like indicator next to a track.
These metrics are always delayed by 2-3 days though: 10.000 plays on a Monday would be visible on a Wednesday or Thursday.
In the past, Analytics were accessible for managers and labels via Spotify’s integration with Next Big Sound (a social media data aggregator for artists). Recently however, Spotify announced Fan Insights, for which limited beta applications are being accepted here.
We’ve recently received access to Spotify’s more extensive Analytics platform and the data is incredibly interesting – all our artists see a massive fall-off of plays on Saturday and Sunday, whereas the more downtempo music peaks in plays on Monday and more club-oriented music performs best on a Friday.
We’re also seeing that the bulk of our Spotify audience is in the United States, followed by the UK, Sweden and Germany. Germans seem to love bass music and trap.
Verified profiles
Beyond the freemium and premium subscription levels, Spotify makes a distinction between traditional user accounts and artist profiles.
When a release is distributed to Spotify, a profile is created for the artist, automatically generating a profile picture based on the release’s artwork.
Initially, these artist profiles are detached from any user accounts, however through requesting verification one can link these together, as well as add an about page with a custom biography, as well as customize the artwork – and receive a shiny blue checkmark (check out the San Holo page as an example).
The linkup between the profile and user account is great, because it’ll merge all the followers of both accounts into one and allow the artist or label to use the personal account as if it were the artist account, sharing all activity in the process.
Spotify Download Priority Health
This creates great opportunities for sharing content within Spotify (by right clicking a release), broadcasting it to all of the account’s followers with a custom message.
Any playlists that are created by the user are now linked and displayed to the artist profile. This is amazing and allows an artist with say 20.000 followers to create a playlist, share it to the followers and kickstart the playlist’s follower growth.
If you’re verified, I highly suggest you to use this trick to your advantage, creating a playlist in which you can include all your releases (titled something like ‘Artist – Official Releases’) and one for your inspirations (‘Artist – Inspirations’). This will be interesting for your fans to follow and allows you to give your releases a little extra push when they come out by including them in those lists.
https://evercomputer857.weebly.com/blog/ad-blocker-spotify-app. You can request verification for your account here.
–
I hope this article improves your understanding of Spotify and how to excel on the platform. Please let me know what your biggest struggle is on the platform in the comments, or any other questions you might have. I’ve also put together a checklist of ‘best practices’ you can use in order to get the most out of your Spotity profile which you can get below.
If you’re interested in other platforms such as SoundCloud you can check out my newest article here on how you can improve your SoundCloud marketing game.
How To Download Songs From Spotify
Like this content? Check out the free video series for my new course, the Music Marketing Academy. You can get access here.