Spotibook
There are numerous musical services online which allow users to listen to their favorite artists free of charge via the insertion of “occasional”, they heavily stretch this word, advertisements into their music stream or for a small monthly fee remove these advertisements altogether. Some of these services are: Last.fm, Rdio, Spotify, and Grooveshark. Although all of these apps provide a quality service, Spotify has been taking off in popularity in relation to their competitors due to their strong linkages within the network giant Facebook.
Spotify’s ability to establish these strong linkages is the product of Facebook’s public endorsement of the product, allowing users to solely join through Facebook connect as well as the fact that music is a social experience that ties many people together. Facebook’s public endorsement of Spotify at the F8 conference skyrocketed the popularity of their service. Since the conference, Spotify is up to 4.4 million active users and jumped from 1.12 million to 3.25 the day following the conference. The following graph is courtesy of insidefacebook.com and depicts the enormous jump in spotify users after the F8 conference.
Although Facebook also promoted Rdio at the F8 conference, their relatively small jump in users has likely declined due to the fact that friends listening to Spotify shows up in the Facebook ticker (a mini news feed that quickly goes through current friends activities at the top of the homepage.
As stated earlier, music is a shared experience and Spotify facilitates the ability that Facebook members have of sharing music with one another. Grooveshark and Last.fm allow users to connect to Facebook; however, by forcing users to log-in with their Facebook account, Facebook can obtain data from Spotify and post it on a user’s wall and in their ticker. The seamless integration of Spotify and Facebook should prompt a name change for the program: Spotibook. Unless the user turns off this functionality, all of their friends can see what they are listening to on Spotify thus introducing a set of users friends to the software.
Facebook is able to track what songs a user’s friends like and what playlists their friends subscribe to thus increasing their ability to market advertisements to members and suggest songs and artists that they would enjoy. By advertising artists that a user may like on Spotify that match their preferences, they can further improve the strength of their linkages. The fact that a new member can learn about music that they will enjoy that they haven’t previously heard of creates a lot of loyalty towards the software.
Ultimately Spotify demonstrates the importance of network connections in a market. By creating more linkages within the community, they are increasing their market power. Although this is good from the standpoint of Spotify, from the position of the active user like myself, it concerns me that they may start eliminating free accounts or lessen the amount of stream-able media you are allowed per month, thereby prompting a user to purchase a premium package. Only time will tell what Spotify evolves into next.
http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/09/26/spotify-gains-million-f8/
http://gizmodo.com/5844461/facebook-musics-biggest-loser-lastfm