#ScorpionSZN: an invasive Spotify marketing blitz
On June 28th, Drake dropped his latest album “Scorpion”on Apple Music. Two hours later, not only did the musical work release on Spotify, but a whole new page takeover. To celebrate the album’s debut, Spotify created an album cover for the majority of the playlists/moods available on the platform.
From “Songs to Sing in the Car” to “Bachata Lovers,” Spotify users could find Drake’s face plastered on all the cover art for the playlists. Sure enough, the artist’s “Scorpion” album broke streaming records
Titled “#ScorpionSZN,” the campaign posed as a celebrity takeover by Spotify.
#ScorpionSZN: It’s a Drake ad — sort of.
People signing in to Spotify found the search page full of Drake. Playlists, which most are normally not associated with the artist, had Drake in them.
This is How We Do — Drake
Beast Mode — Drake
Best of British — Drake
The marketing blitz comes from the streaming platform’s encouragement to push for the artist to break as many records as it possibly can. Within 24 hours, Apple Music claimed the album had 170 million streams.
As previously shown in a Spotify tweet, the album was being streamed over 10 million times per hour. While the album was doing well in numbers, it may have come at a cost to the platform: it was affecting the Spotify user experience.
Advertising at the risk of user experience
If you’re familiar with user experience, you might have read about Tencent’s WeChat. The popular Chinese app has a huge following but provides their users very little exposure to ads. While popping ads into the platform could provide immense revenue for the parent company, Tencent understands that this would affect the WeChat user experience and has thus strayed away from this. User experience is valuable and it is not something you should sacrifice.
Spotify, however, does not seem to have gotten the memo. The “celebrity takeover” meant that many Spotify users — even those that pay a Premium price in order to avoid ads — still got to see the “ScorpionSZN” campaign. People took to Twitter to express their opinions on seeing Drake everywhere.
According to Reddit user Ayuvelo, a Spotify customer support representative confirmed that there was a campaign to globally promote the album to all users and that “this is not an ad since it’s not interrupting [the] music while [it is] playing.”
Additionally, on another Reddit post with 24k upvotes and 1.7k comments, many other users expressed their concern with “celebrity takeovers” becoming a norm on Spotify. Although Spotify does advertise its premium services as “listen without ads — enjoy nonstop music,” many users have fogged the experience into “an ad-free experience.”
How marketing blitzes have been done in the past
This is not the first we’ve seen a marketing blitz, but two do stand out. For the sake of contrast, I’ll highlight a good and bad one in recent memory.
The Good: It’s a Tide Ad | Super Bowl 51
Much like Spotify, Tide took over the Super Bowl earlier this year. Amid a bad spotlight of teenagers eating Tide Pods, Tide managed to blitz the Super Bowl with their Grand Prix winning ad. Aside from parodying other famous Super Bowl ads, the original premise of the ad was that every ad with stainless shirts was a Tide ad. Covering basically all its grounds, Tide even created a fun graphic to place David Harbour as the two opposing teams.
The Ugly: U2 & Apple
If you bought the iPhone 6 at its debut, then you might remember this one. Upon unveiling the new Apple hardware, many Apple users realized that they could not delete the U2 album “Songs of Innoncence.” Like the apps pre-installed by the cellphone carrier, Apple users were unable to delete the U2 album that took up space in their phone.
Eventually, Apple made it possible for users to delete the album if they so wished to.
Conclusion
As of now, Reddit user Ayuvelo has claimed that they had been offered a free month of Premium given the scenario. Going forward, we might only see a tweet from Spotify apologizing for the campaign much like a la Apple with U2, soon providing a feature to disable the Drake takeover.
Got any thoughts to add? Tweet me @juliangumbo or comment below!
Julian Gamboa is a UC Berkeley graduate with a focus on marketing. Julian was selected as a LinkedIn Top Voice for Marketing and #Social Media (2017) and a Course Instructor of the marketing and digital publishing course Digital Marketing Today at the Haas School of Business. He is also the founder of Digiviewpoint, a millennial publishing account.
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