It's All About You!

Spotify is winning the music streaming market, by a lot. Spotify has about 155 million paying subscribers, whereas Apple Music has about 72 million.

What's even more impressive, however, is how Spotify has dominated social sharing. Despite going up against perhaps the two best-funded competitors in the world (Apple and Amazon), #Spotify has been mentioned more than 19 million times on Instagram, whereas #AppleMusic and #AmazonMusic combine for less than half of that volume.

How do they do it? They make it all about us, the users.

Just about any time that you see a Spotify ad, social post, or pretty much any of their brand messaging, it's not about their features, or sound quality, or even their success. Spotify gets people talking by talking about them.

Their billboards point out surprising stats from their user data. Their features give users information about their own listening habits that they can then share with their friends, and their most successful brand move to date has been the annual year-end campaign called Wrapped, where each listener's preferences are aggregated into a beautiful, shareable piece of social content.

This week they've doubled down on that concept, introducing their latest initiative called Only You. It attempts to take the fun and novelty of Wrapped and extend it year-round. Users are served up idiosyncratic little anecdotes that Spotify has identified about them, like artists that wouldn't typically be played back to back.

Their hyper-personalization starts long before the beautifully designed social assets, however, and like any good hospitality business, Spotify starts every relationship by asking for your preferences.

Then, like a great hospitality business, Spotify records that information and uses it not only to make your streaming experience better, but also to serve you with easy, fun ways to share your experience with your friends. Meanwhile, Apple seems so concerned with delivering a beautifully designed platform that it forgets to personalize the experience, and thereby misses the opportunity to create a connection with its users.

So what?

Few of us have the volume of data or the AI capabilities of a massive music streaming service, but every one of us has the ability to get to know our customers. Our social media newsfeeds are so filled with well-designed, but meaningless, brand posts and product shots that no amount of photo editing can make them cut through and make people care.

What will get noticed, as we've seen from Spotify, is when we can see ourselves reflected in the content. When the things that make us unique show up, and it's obvious that the brand has been paying attention to what we love, that's when the message is going to cut through.

And if we're really good at listening, sometimes we won't even need to do the storytelling because our customers will do that work for us.

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting while streaming the 10in7 Weekly Playlist on Spotify