What Do Those Spotify 'Top Fans' Messages Mean?
A new marketing message tells people they are big fans of certain artists. But why?
This week, Spotify sent some unspecified portion of its hundreds of millions of users a content. The message told those users something world-shaking.
"You are extraordinary of Elizabeth Taylor Swift's top fans worldwide," one iteration of this message aforementioned. "You're one of their top 1% fans. Hit Play on their radio and we'll provide an endless stream of their euphony."
Populate received similar messages roughly a wide array of artists in the app: Kendrick Lamar, the Barenaked Ladies, Tove Lo, the Doors and many, umteen more. The Spotify users weren't always in the top one percent of fans; some messages claimed listeners ranked in the top 2 or iii percent of the artists' fans.
Many reacted to these messages As Spotify might have hoped they would, communion them with friends and with followers on ethnic media. Regina Anderson, 22, was one of many people told they were among Ms. Swift's top fans and who, upon receiving the message, broadcast information technology widely.
But something struck Ms. Anderson, a communications assistant in Capital of the United States, D.C., about the message.
"The way of life that they phrase IT is a little weird," she said. "It fair-minded seems odd. I guess one per centum of Zachary Taylor Swift's monthly listeners is 300,000 or something like that." She wondered how some other people had received the duplicate content.
Peter Collins, a spokesperson for Spotify, declined to provide some information on how many fans received them, how the percentages were premeditated or what it meant to be in a top percentile of an artist's fan base.
Mr. Collins did relegate the messages as a "test."
"At Spotify, we routinely conduct a number of tests in an drive to ameliorate our user experience," atomic number 2 same in a statement. "Some of those tests end astir paving the path for our broader user experience and others serve only as an important learning. We aren't sledding to comment along specific tests at this clock."
Corresponding many other media platforms, Spotify has successful no secret of its practice of collecting user data. It often incorporates that data into its merchandising, feeding it rearwards to users systematic to promote itself. This practice is most prominent during its period year-end Spotify Wrapped marketing effort, in which the flowing platform provides users with a short presentation about their most-played artists and songs. In past 2022, Spotify Wrapped allowed users a window into their hearing habits since 2010.
"Spotify has exploiter listening analytics data dating back to our first years as a streaming chopine," several of its engineers explained in a blog post about that project.
But while the Spotify Wrapped political campaign provides many context of use for the data it offers users, the messages this calendar week were more difficult to parse. Spotify collects data, uses that data to food market its features — in this case, artist-specific playlists — but wish not dedicate its users any perceptivity into what the data substance, OR even whether IT represents something real.
"I thought information technology was sort of stochastic given that it's non the end of the yr, IT wasn't part of a roundup, it was just like 'Ohio hey past the way,'" aforementioned Kasey Carlson, 22, WHO was told that she was i of Encounter the Doorknocker's top fans. (Her favorite song of the artist's is "Cocoa Butter Kisses.")
Cherie Hu, who writes the medicine applied science newssheet Water and Music, said that the test was typical of Spotify's lack of transparency.
"What that message does is it reduces fandom to a very surface-level metric happening Spotify," she aforementioned. "This raises a question for me of how Spotify is in reality hard fandom. Are they calculating it just by the numerate of streams? Are they trailing it by how many people go to the artist page?"
In any ways, what Spotify is doing is familiar, as anonymized data becomes a describe portion of how marketers appeal to customers. Jeff Chester, the head of the nonprofit Center for Digital Democracy, said that such practices had become banality.
"Upright recall about going into the supermarket and getting mobile coupons," he aforesaid. "Whol of that is bound together as part of the profiling process of you and you have none idea how information technology's collected or what IT means."
But these latest Spotify messages are different in two of import ways. The first is that they purport to ploughshare the service's information directly with users. And the second is that its data is centered on music, a in particular person-to-person and personality-revealing aspect of peoples's lives. Matthew Perpetua, a longtime music blogger and a former director of quizzes at BuzzFeed, said that the way that Spotify served up data to users was reminiscent of a personality quiz.
"In this case, the quiz itself is antimonopoly your engagement with Spotify," he said. "In position of answering random questions that have been put in front you, you're just going about your liveliness and listening to what you want. And they turn it into a quiz OR game where they'Re like, 'This is who you are.'"
Operating theater non. While many who posted all but the Spotify messages known as fans of the artists they were being told they were fans of, others were baffled.
Matt Moore, a 33-year-old software developer in Raw Jersey, was told connected Thursday that he is one of Cake's height fans.
"I mean, I'm a moderate Coat sports fan," he same. "I wouldn't allege I'm in the hundredth. I hear to Patty every so often."
Mr. Moore aforementioned that the subject matter was confusing. "Largely it makes Maine feel mischievous for Cake," he said. "If I'm their numeral i biggest fan, then it's saying something."
You're in the Top 1% of Fans Spotify
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/style/spotify-top-fans-messages.html
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