Spotify and the Curation of a Personal Brand

In 2016 Spotify purchased Dublin startup Soundwave for an undisclosed sum.

Soundwave was founded in 2011 by Brendan O'Driscoll, Aidan Sliney and Craig Watson and began as a mobile music-discovery app where users could share the music they were listening to in real time with other app users.

In 2013 Soundwave was named by Forbes as one of the '5 Companies that Made Media Consumption Smarter' that year. At the time it was acquired, Soundwave had been downloaded more than 1.5 million times across 190 countries.

Quoting siliconrepublic.com: 

' “The attraction for Spotify is our technology helps understand what people are listening to and it can use that technology to bring user growth to the next level and focus and define a new onboarding experience,” co-founder Brendan O’Driscoll told Siliconrepublic.com.

O’Driscoll said that very little will change at Soundwave except the company will be working on integrating its technology with Spotify and job titles and office locations will be a discussion for another day.' (2016).

Since being acquired by Spotify, Soundwave no longer exists as an app.

Since 2016, Spotify have accelerated ahead of its competitors like Apple Music and Youtube Music in one area in particular: shareability.

When you listen to a track on Spotify, it offers you the option to share the track through various services and platforms. I'm going to talk about how you can share songs to Instagram as this is the platform I am most familiar with and the way I tend to share my music the most.

When you choose to share a song to Instagram stories, you are brought directly to the Instagram app to click confirm and post it to your story. For 24 hours, your followers can see what type of music you're listening to.

Larger artists or artists who are currently releasing can include moving visuals which will play in the background behind a picture of the album or track cover itself. And of course, there will be an option for your followers to click on the story and be directed to Spotify to listen to the track themselves.

Another clever thing that Spotify does is that it offers third-party developers access to its users' data via APIs- Application Programming Interfaces.

(Of course, you the listener needs to click a box agreeing to the terms and conditions of your data being shared- but do you ever read the terms and conditions?)

Different developers can use this data to create services that generate fun or interesting graphics based on your listening history. Two popular examples are Instafest (what would your dream music festival look like?) and Receiptify (What would your music taste look like as a...shopping receipt?)

Right now, Receiptify only works for users of Spotify, Apple Music and last.fm. The Apple Music API only supports 'Heavy Rotation', ie. what music its users listen to the most without specifying the timeframe it is listened to over. Spotify's API allows for specification of listening habits within the space of a week, four weeks, six months and beyond.

Instafest works for Spotify, Apple Music and last.fm users too. However, the Apple Music option offered by the developers is a beta version.

(I cannot speak for the last.fm option for either of these sites)

These graphics are just some of many that become popular for the space of a week or so, get shared by users on social media and then disappear from public consciousness. But in the timeframe in which they are a cool and quirky phenomenon they offer listeners to communicate their music taste and thus themselves to their friends and followers on social media whilst also staying up to date with trends in sharing and graphics.

By extending the hand out to these third-party developers through API sharing, Spotify further generates more advertising for itself.

Streaming services like Apple Music and Tidal have slowly developed ways of their users sharing the songs they listen to on their social media platforms but they have not been able to capitalise on this form of free advertising the way Spotify has.

In a 2011 paper, researchers and academics from Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST) looked at music sharing behaviour on social media. Their research suggested that interactivity was shaped by three key elements: direction of communication, user control and time. Sharing the music you listen to on social media allows you to communicate who you are- the subcultures you may be a part of, how funny or cool you are, how great or different your taste is. Spotify offers control in curating a personal brand online in that you can pick the songs you share. And you can do it quickly too- it takes about three clicks and forty seconds from the moment you hit play on a song to hit share, go to Instagram and post it to your story. As we become increasingly impatient and increasingly attached to our own sense of individuality on the internet, Spotify recognises this and makes it a key part of how it advertises.