Entry 10: Spotify

Spotify is a downloadable music service that has every well-known song and most unknown stuff as well. (http://www.spotify.com/us/video-splash/?utm_source=spotify&utm_ medium=web&utm_campaign=start) It's sleek, fast, legal and free, and all the music is perfect quality. You can search by artist, track, album, playlist, or song, organize your tracks and create radio stations (like Pandora). When you listen to tracks it displays similar artists, so it's incredibly easy to explore new, good music. It also links to Facebook, so you can follow your friends and view their favorites and playlists. It's awesome, and after using it for a little while there's no way I could go back to using any other music service. 

It probably sounds like I'm advertising for Spotify, but they definitely don't need any more of that. Although the program itself is really streamlined and cool, I get the feeling the people running it are either poor or rude. You can buy a premium version with a monthly fee that has no ads, but let's be honest, who pays for things on the internet? Using the free version is a constant battle between liking music and liking a say in what's on your computer screen. 

Understandably, there are audio advertisements every so often between songs. All of Spotify's ads have the SAME annoying jingle playing in the background, and are voiced by very self satisfied-sounding voice actors, and are all for Spotify. Sometimes artists do the ads for their music, on Spotify. The program opens automatically when you turn on the computer. When you press the red "x" in the top right corner, it minimizes, not closes, and you have to go to the icons on the right of your bottom toolbar to actually close it. If it's open and you go on another page for more than five or ten minutes without viewing it, it opens onto your screen and you have to minimize it again. It's incredibly hard to delete from your computer's system (my dad tried, he got annoyed of it popping up all the time). There's also a big sidebar that flickers through different ads. 

Basically, it behaves like a computer virus. It opens when you don't open it, won't close, it accesses your information, and is impossible to fully delete. I'd say it's worth it because it really is a great music service, and it's free for the user but still gives money to the artists you listen to (cough cough--unlike illegal downloads). Being worth it doesn't change the fact that Spotify's version of advertising is incredibly annoying, though. 

The main technique used is repetition. They throw their name at your face constantly; just having it written a few places and in every audio ad clip isn't enough, it pops up on your screen every few minutes, whether you're using it or not. On the surface it's only irritating, we're using your product, leave us alone. But looking at it from a financial standpoint, it might actually be more honest than other types of advertising. 

When the program pops up on the screen every 10 minutes or so, you aren't actually viewing it (like you would be if you really opened it with your mouse), so when you click it, it reacts as if you've clicked on it to open it. Then you have to click back out of it. So, they kind of force you to click on it. It's obviously manipulative, almost to the point of them basically saying, "Hey sorry guys our advertising contract says if you use the free version you have to actually look at our page at least once every ten minutes. This will just take a second sorry." 

You can feel them working around a system that makes them money, makes artists money, and gives listeners free, high quality music. That's a pretty tall order. I started writing this planning on mostly bashing Spotify, but after thinking about the reasons behind their marketing strategy and the product they are able to deliver, I actually think they do a good job of keeping things painless for users.