Monday, April 23, 2012

Coca Cola And Spotify Equal Pop Fizzle?

Advertising runs everything we know, plain and simple. If it wasn't for advertising would we have all the shows on TV? I highly doubt it, as there would be a lack of money to produce such entities. This convergence is good and bad, but at least if you can see through the crap and understand its just marketing. Hell, use the service as needed without feeling like you have to drink a coke to enjoy the streaming music of Spotify.

Personally, we hope that Spotify does well. Not in the sense that it is a perfect service, but it serves a purpose and could potentially help more bands to be heard. It isn't the best thing since sliced bread, but its a start at a solid music streaming service, which can cue up most anything you want on demand. Other services are offering similar products, but Spotify seems to be taking the lead or at least getting the most attention. If Coca-Cola can inject advertising dollars and help to get the bands paid from the streams instead of the paltry amounts that Spotify pays now, then great.

So here it is Coke, use this Spotify partnership as a platform for the streaming music service to better pay the bands. If both of yall cannot do that, well move on to the next batch of sheep.

See the original article on Hypebot.com

Coca Cola and Spotify are creating new partnership for music streaming
"Yesterday Spotify and CocaCola announced a major partnership. Brands have taken an interesting role beyond just ad dollars at Spotify starting with its July 2011 launch. I know this because I worked with Chevy to partner with blogs/publishers to generate editorial exposure for Spotify and Chevy in exchange for advance access to the streaming service for their readers. It seemed only suitable that Spotify would try to evolve this symbiotic relationship with brands even further.

During the morning talk, Spotify founder Daniel Ek made at Ad Age's Digital Conference, he kept referring to Spotify as a platform as opposed to simply a streaming service. Depending on the brand, having a Spotify app might even be more important than having a Pinterest or Instagram account because of the emotional role music plays in people's everyday lives. To quote a Coca-cola rep, "we're trying to develop a Coca-Cola experience within Spotify." 


On the surface this partnership sounds pretty innovative. Coca-cola will tie Spotify into their global marketing efforts (including Olympics, FIFA, and various live events) and help Spotify launch their service in new markets. Spotify will help Coca-Cola look cool by injecting them into the conversation of music fans. In addition, the two partnered this past weekend to host a friendly competition between 6 different hack teams. The winner, named "London Calling," will be an integral part of the public launch of this partnership. 


However, the whole event was presented very ambiguously and vague without going into much specifics. Since this all was kept fairly abstruse, it's hard to ignore whether or not how the listening community will react to an even deeper branded experience when some already see Spotify ads as an interruption? On the flipside, Spotify insisted at the Press Event that "this is not an advertising campaign [with Coca-cola]." In addition, Daniel sited Subaru's First Car playlist as a successful brand in his Ad Age presentation by saying that the average person on the playlist listened for an average of 70+minutes. People shared and spoke about what song defined their first car, and Subaru wins because they're at the core of conversation.


Discovery & Amplification
I guess my gut insists that in order for the execution of this partnership to be successful, Coca-cola needs to improve the Discovery and Amplification experiences of listeners without inauthentically injecting their beverages into conversation."