How Spotify Uses Data to Build Customer Loyalty

A few stats courtesy of Spotify’s incredible “Year in Music” personal audit of my listening habits:

• I listened to TV On The Radio 412 times so far this year.
• I listened to their song “Quartz” 40 times.
• Overall, I listened to 43 thousand minutes of music across 1,053 artists and 5,369 tracks in total.

Which paints a more vivid picture, those data points or me saying, “I like music a lot and listen to all different kinds”?

If you were a marketer of music— a promoter or a label exec, let’s say— which would give you more to work with to engage me? 

Obviously, the more data you have at your disposal, the more specific and intelligent you can be in your “pitch.” If you were thinking of leading with the top of the Modern Country charts or Taylor Swift, both enormously popular generally, the data would tell you otherwise specifically. The clues are there in the data. You just have to follow them.

But move beyond the pitch mentality. Want to keep me loyal? Pretty obviously some tickets to TVOTR would go a long way. Data-informed selling is great and infinitely superior to spray and pray mass marketing, but data can and should be used for so much more.

Don’t just use it when you think I’m in the market to buy something or you’re in the market to sell something. Use it all along the path in-between. Keep a close watch on where it says I’ve come from. Then use it to light the way to where I’m going next too.