Blackbeard Blog: Blackbeard Blog - Never, ever ask your artists to voice their own...
Jonathan Deamer
· 4 months ago
So maybe a good place to stick a longer-than-usual ad break on Spotify would be "between discs" on double albums - they could even make a feature/joke out of if. I'm sure as it grows they'll come up with more intelligent ad-placement mechanisms. I'm sure there are probably some slots on albums that are more suited to ads than others (eg. not between tracks than segue into each other).
BTW, only just realised I'm not following you on Tumblr - corrected straight away! :-p
koganbot
· 4 months ago
Maybe the ads simply need to become better.
There was - to my mind - a big rise in the quality of TV commercials in the mid '80s, when, among other things, rock and other forms of popular music began to be used in the commercials. The commentary among critics tended to be "Oh, noes! Our music has been irreparably violated, everything is cross-promotion, and music as a democratic project is finished." Whereas actually what was finished were various broad associations between musical styles and social divides (class and generational). Not that music stopped being a social marker - that will never happen - but that it was less a marker of The Great Battles Of The Sixties (And Seventies), hence in using rock and soul and modern pop in commercials one's risk of alienating a large segment of potential customers was now far less. But even more important, on a practical level, was that, given the ever-increasing ownership of remote devices for controlling the TV, the watcher could hit mute, change channels, or hit fast forward (if watching a program she'd prerecorded). Previously, advertisers had a captive audience, and their goal was to hammer their message into the consumer's brain, but they could disregard whether the viewer was having a good time during the commercial, as long as the message got embedded. But now, commercials had to compete as programming. (One of the stupider commentaries on music videos was that they were nothing but advertising, and whoah! and woe! here was a channel, MTV, devoted to nothing but advertising. Whereas obviously, if people were watching MTV on their own volition, they were treating the music videos as programming.) Not that people turned on a regular program for the commercials, but the commercials now really had to appeal. The music was one way to make them appeal, and to combat the mute button.
Don't know how relevant this is to Spotify, which doesn't have to contend with channel switching and fast forwards, but Spotify has to compete with lots of other streamers of music, and with legal and illegal downloading, so if the ads are too irritating or disruptive, Spotify as a whole and therefore the advertisers in particular lose audience. You're probably overestimating the negative associations between an irritating ad (or irritation at an interruption) and the artist being promoted, but there could be a problem for Spotify overall.
koganbot
· 4 months ago
(But bear in mind that, residing in Denver, I've never heard Spotify.)
mike t-d
· 4 months ago
Further confirmation that shelling out for Spotify Premium (with added higher bitrate) has been my most satisfying music purchase of the year....
All Comments
BTW, only just realised I'm not following you on Tumblr - corrected straight away! :-p
There was - to my mind - a big rise in the quality of TV commercials in the mid '80s, when, among other things, rock and other forms of popular music began to be used in the commercials. The commentary among critics tended to be "Oh, noes! Our music has been irreparably violated, everything is cross-promotion, and music as a democratic project is finished." Whereas actually what was finished were various broad associations between musical styles and social divides (class and generational). Not that music stopped being a social marker - that will never happen - but that it was less a marker of The Great Battles Of The Sixties (And Seventies), hence in using rock and soul and modern pop in commercials one's risk of alienating a large segment of potential customers was now far less. But even more important, on a practical level, was that, given the ever-increasing ownership of remote devices for controlling the TV, the watcher could hit mute, change channels, or hit fast forward (if watching a program she'd prerecorded). Previously, advertisers had a captive audience, and their goal was to hammer their message into the consumer's brain, but they could disregard whether the viewer was having a good time during the commercial, as long as the message got embedded. But now, commercials had to compete as programming. (One of the stupider commentaries on music videos was that they were nothing but advertising, and whoah! and woe! here was a channel, MTV, devoted to nothing but advertising. Whereas obviously, if people were watching MTV on their own volition, they were treating the music videos as programming.) Not that people turned on a regular program for the commercials, but the commercials now really had to appeal. The music was one way to make them appeal, and to combat the mute button.
Don't know how relevant this is to Spotify, which doesn't have to contend with channel switching and fast forwards, but Spotify has to compete with lots of other streamers of music, and with legal and illegal downloading, so if the ads are too irritating or disruptive, Spotify as a whole and therefore the advertisers in particular lose audience. You're probably overestimating the negative associations between an irritating ad (or irritation at an interruption) and the artist being promoted, but there could be a problem for Spotify overall.