Fanning the Flame: Thoughts on Spotify Fan Engagement

The universality of music means that as technology and mobile grows, so does the market for Spotify. As the platform looks to grow its user base, it’s critical to evaluate the user journey, keeping in mind the nuances between individuals and countries, but mining their data for tendencies and behaviors that can be used to constantly improve the experience.

From my experience working with communities and fan engagement for a variety of brands from technology (Microsoft, Yahoo) to media (BBC) to food/beverage (Starbucks), nothing drives new usage like existing fans, and activating them to spread awareness of the app while having a solid nurture system to grow new users into fans who will again advocate is a consistent and sustainable way to grow usage.

Three Key Audiences

There are endless ways to segment audiences, but for the purposes of fan advocacy it’s fair to split them into three key groups, each unique and holding an immense amount of opportunity, each critical to activating the other two groups:

• Avid Users (upwards of 500 streams a month)
• Potential Users (have not downloaded Spotify yet, may or not be aware of it)
• New Users (just downloaded Spotify)

Avid users are awesome; this is ultimately what we’d like each user to be, but there’s a complex cycle that takes them to that stage, and amongst this group of loyal fans lies a big opportunity to tap into their networks and begin a new cycle, creating awareness and interest amongst non-users of Spotify. Their advocacy is the most compelling (not to mention unpaid) marketing available.

After that, it will be key to convert those new users into avid users, beginning new cycles that will continue growing Spotify’s global user base. Repeat cycle, with scale.

So, we face two main questions at this point:

• 1. How do we leverage existing avid users to convert potential users to new users?
• 2. How do we deepen engagement with new users to make Spotify an everyday habit and convert them to avid users? (Point: initial registration and first use)

Encouraging Advocacy Amongst Avid Users

Let’s begin with our first question- how do we leverage existing avid users to convert potential users to new users?

The best kind of social media marketing is advocacy to a fan’s personal network; it’s authentic, organic, and more compelling than brand-created content. This kind of social sharing will grab the attention of potential new users who are not familiar with the service by not only creating awareness but if done properly, presenting a potential value add from the get go because the content shared itself is interesting.

Avid Spotify fans are not averse to sharing, but it has to be made convenient and valuable to them. The convenience factor is as simple as making sharing buttons and functionality more prominent. The value add portion is more difficult, but because the content we’re working with is so universal and personal, there’s great potential in creating stories people want to share.

Let’s consider this question: why do people share content on social media? Sure, we come across tons of content on an everyday basis, and we also enjoy a certain proportion of that, but it’s rare that something makes you stop and think, “I want to share this with my network.”

In the end, it’s all about social currency. People are self-centered; content is shared as a way of self-expression, a vehicle for saying something about oneself without explicitly saying it. Just like how you post a photo of yourself on a trail to convey that you’re outdoorsy, or share a quote about education to show you care about that issue, people will evaluate content from the lens of how their followers will perceive them as a result of sharing it. It can also simply be an opportunity for someone to be narcissistic and post about themselves under the guise of following a trend. A few examples of this include:

• Ice Bucket Challenge- One reason this went “viral”? It put the sharer as the main character, giving them an excuse to record themselves doing something and uploading it without having to justify it.

• Blobla- This blew up on my newsfeed lately and I was immediately compelled to try and generate my own poem. It’s weird, quirky, and everyone knows you can try as many times until you get a poem you like, but people will share this because it’s a perfect vehicle for self-expression.

• MTV Match Machine- Briefly took over my newsfeed during college when seemingly everyone was sharing this. It’s a way to make a statement about someone you’re close to, but via a sentiment generated by a “knowing” machine.

With this in mind, let’s test out a few strategies that may increase the rate of social sharing amongst avid users of Spotify.

Project 1- It’s All About Me (Effect of Personalized vs. General Reporting on Sharing and Downloads)

With the personalized listening data Spotify has on users, there exists an immense opportunity to leverage this as a way to drastically improve sharing rates, a feature which exists on Spotify but is somewhat hidden and not incentivized. The Year in Review feature was the first time I really saw Spotify “go viral”; with its ability to tell stories, it showed how compelling music can be as a soundtrack to our life, not only painting our everyday with tracks but telling a story through the notes and beats in retrospect.

Hypothesis 1: Leveraging existing user data, creating personalized reports on listening behavior that are easily shareable will increase social media engagement.

Hypothesis 2: Social posts containing personalized data increase rate of downloads amongst those who see shared posts

Test: Create a monthly “Month in Music” report (using the same technology as “Year in Music” report) and alert users with push notification

Level of Effort: Medium

Potential Business Impact: High

Goals: Increase social sharing by determining which types of content users most engage with, increase downloads by determining which types of content non-users most engage with

KPIs: # of external engagements, # of downloads (tracked through custom URL)

Target Segments: Existing avid users (above 500 streams a month), non-users

Channel Plans: Push notifications (no push to publicize widely at this stage)

Plans if successful: Push out monthly personalized “Month in Music” report with push notifications that can easily be shared

Project 2- A Sentence is Worth a Million Shares?

Leveraging our social principles of sharing, people are more likely to share a post that says something about them. As well, images boost retweets by 35%. Spotify has a healthy following on social media, but there lies an opportunity to engage them more deeply and increase shares with content that expresses a feeling/belief/attitude. Consider this example of Tweets sent out around Super Bowl time from Spotify and Apple Music:

Hypothesis:- Owned social posts containing pictures with lyrics on them will increase audience engagements vs. high-level artist/song-related posts.

Test: At similar times during days of the week with similar levels of engagement (Tuesday and Wednesday), Tweet out a lyric image on one day and a post promoting the artist playlist on another.

Level of Effort: Low

Potential Business Impact: Medium

Goals: Determine which types of social media posts are more likely to be retweeted/shared by Spotify followers to their networks

KPIs: Number of Retweets of Lyric Post vs Number of Retweets of Generic Post

Target Segments: Existing fans (followers on Twitter)

Channel Plans: Twitter, Facebook

Plans if Successful: Integrate more lyric art into owned social channels. Consider future feature of selecting lyrics as they are shown onscreen with sharing option.

Encouraging Adoption Amongst New Users (Right After Initial Registration)

In my personal experience, upon first joining Spotify there were two main differentiators from the platform I had been used to for 5+ years, iTunes.

1. Broader availability of music without having to download (apparent from first use)
2. Ability to track listening preferences and give recommendations (apparent after two weeks use)

Both these features helped with why I and most of my friends (from a spot test) personally continued to use Spotify- discovering new music. However, with these two features came two barriers that I’ve often seen people struggle with upon initially downloading the app.

1. Music is scattered, as not all the music in the app is music you’ve personally selected, and the music you like is not centrally organized
2. Playlist feature is not immediately apparent and takes effort to build something up from scratch
3. Listening preference data is not there at the beginning, lack of knowledge compared to other platforms they may be used to using (i.e. Pandora)

With this in mind, however, there are ways Spotify can make this initial transition easier, including:

1. Importing playlists from iTunes (existing feature)
2. Helping to build a suggested playlist from very early listening data to make users aware of this feature (potential feature)
3. Migrate existing data on listening preferences from features like LastFM (potential feature)

I initially struggled with switching over to Spotify exclusively because my previous listening habits pre-Spotify was almost 100% Kpop, and at the time (December 2014) the Kpop catalog on Spotify was not as extensive as it is now, and even with improvements still has major gaps. As a result, I was living in a 50/50 split between the iTunes Library I was used to and Spotify, which was convenient and interesting but lacked my previous playlists and the extensive Kpop offering I needed.

Let me caveat this by saying I did not know about the “Import iTunes Playlist” feature (which is absolutely magical but painfully hidden), which would have made my transition to using exclusively Spotify much faster (it ended up taking one whole year).

But something interesting happened to me that may not be unique — my music tastes actually changed because of Spotify’s music discovery features. Looking at my Year in Review, it looks nothing like what I listen to now; I discovered new parts of Western music (one I had been entirely out of touch with) that opened my ears and I effectively left Kpop behind, embracing fully the quickness and ease of discovery Spotify provided. As the listening analytics grew smarter due to my increased use, so did my love for the app.

However, the transition still took one year and coincided with an interesting cultural shift in my life. Many users don’t last beyond that critical two week period and begin building their own cozy spaces within the app. Let’s test some features that can help with this initial transition.

Project 3: Help Me With Relocation, Please!

Hypothesis: Prompting new users with a notification to transfer their existing playlists will increase adoption of the app at a critical point in the customer journey.

Test: On a group of new users that sign up within the same day (around 2000), enable a pop up/notification for half of them letting them know they can import their iTunes playlist to Spotify

Level of Effort: Low

Potential Business Impact: High

Goals: Increase adoption of Spotify and remove barrier of transition from previous music platforms not making new users have to “leave everything behind” and start from scratch

KPI: Compare # of streams with notification vs. without

Target Segments: New Users

Channel Plans: Notifications

Plans if Successful: Build in a notification prompting “Import iTunes Playlist?” for new users.

Project 4: Here is a Playlist. It is nice. Wanna try?

Starting to build a playlist is the equivalent of beginning to furnish your own apartment — make it truly your home. It may seem daunting at first with nothing there, so let’s give a little help to a new user so the app feels more than a daunting, scattered collection of music- it feels like their own cozy music library.

Hypothesis: Prompting the building of a custom first playlist (based on initial listening patterns) with 5–10 pre-selected tracks will highlight and encourage the use of this important feature to increase repeat visits to the app, helping establish it as a daily habit.

Test: On a group of new users that sign up within the same day (around 2000), build a custom starter playlist and alert with push notification for half of them.

KPI: Compare # of streams users given the custom starter playlist vs. regular process

Level of Effort: Medium

Potential Business Impact: High

Goals: Increase adoption of Spotify after initial registration by encouraging use of critical feature personalizing experience. Playlists are a big building block of the app, helping organize discoveries, and highlighting it in the beginning should drive increased adoption.

Target Segments: New Users

Channel Plans: Notifications

Other More “Out There” Ideas to Try

There are plenty of other features that can be built into the app, with varying levels of complexity. Without understanding the infrastructure required to build them out, I can’t speculate too much on what the testing mechanism would look like but these would significantly strengthen the use of Spotify as a “Daily Habit,” embedding it more strongly into different aspects of a user’s day, from waking up to going to sleep.

Alarm Clock App

I cannot emphasize how much I wish this existed. One of the best things about the alarm clock app I was using is I could select music from my iTunes library, but since I switched to Spotify this is a major sore spot in my life. The lack of integration with iOS alarm clock apps (at least ones that are easily discoverable) led me to believe Spotify has a major opportunity to build an alarm clock feature into their app that puts them right at the center of their user’s day from the moment it begins (or a few minutes before, depending on how abused the Snooze button is).

Waking up in the morning isn’t exactly the most beautiful task in the world, but having a playlist coax you from your gentle slumber may be one of the better ways to do it. But beyond just music, you want to wake up to something new, exciting, and be psyched for what lies ahead. One of the most interesting apps I’ve downloaded recently is Poncho, a weather app that wakes you up with local weather and traffic conditions. Those may seem like mundane details, but knowing a bit about what’s waiting for me makes me want to get out of bed and experience this day.

Spotify has the perfect platform to build a killer alarm clock feature that incorporates music, personalization, and information. It’s a feature that on its own can attract masses of people, and reinforces usage on a daily basis in a very powerful way. What Spotify can built into an alarm clock feature includes a custom playlist tailored to local weather conditions with weather/traffic notifications displayed on-screen with the alarm. When the user wakes up, they can continue their day with the playlist on and let it transition them into whatever lies ahead.

Music Diary

Music has a way of evoking memories and experiences in a different way from words, and even images and videos. Allowing users to keep a music diary (Spotify doing half the work for them, user filling out the rest), or integrating Spotify with third-party journaling apps such as Day One (with the option to import songs that define parts of their day) would be a great showcase of the app’s ability to capture a different dimension of moments.

Facebook Status Integration

Speaking of social sharing, another area that can be explored is Facebook’s status update section, particularly the “Listening To…” area. It’s possible to select Spotify, but what if they can select which song they’re listening to and the status displays beautifully, linking to the song? It’s possible to do this from within the app, but again this feature is somewhat hidden.

Recommend Shows Based on Listening History and Other Interests

With the launch of video content, it may be hard for initial users to sift through, facing the same dearth of user behavior data they did when they first downloaded the app for music.

There are ways to combat this initial vacuum to generate some suggestions and increase usage, thus building this database of user history in the Shows area. From one’s listening history, Spotify can recommend content related to those artists/genres. As well, they can consider syncing the Interests/Likes section from Facebook to generate more recommendations.

In Conclusion…

Spotify is a very interesting case in building something more substantial out of a catalog of music. The community aspect is not yet fully defined (more prominent friend feed? More notifications? Ability to form fan groups?) and is another area worth exploring. I could honestly go on writing this post with at least 77 other ideas.

As the app continues to grow, a focus on perfecting and connecting the individual journeys of millions, moving through the app at their own pace, is pivotal in making it a more universal constant across devices. Whether it’s the background music of a midday stroll, the fuel behind a late-night study session, or the deliverer of an epiphany to someone during their morning commute, Spotify is delivering the magic of music to the masses in a way that’s wonderfully unique to the individual user. I’m thankful for how it’s changed my life, and as “This is My Year” by Family Force 5 and Matoma begins playing in my ears, perfectly timed, here’s hoping this is Spotify’s year to make its big leap.